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The 
Egregious English 



BY 



angus mcneill 



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New York : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

London: GRANT RICHARDS 

1903 



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THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

JAN 7 190? 

iCopy nght Entry 

ClfiASS ft; XXc. No. 

COPY B. 



Copyright, igo2, by 

angus McNeill 



Published, January, 1903 



Ube TKntcfeerbocfeer press, mew JBorft 



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CONTENTS 




CHAPTER 

I. — Apollo 


PAGE 

I 


II. — The Sportsman 


■ 13 


III. — The Man of Business . 


20 


IV. — The Journalist 


28 


V. — The Employed Person . 


• 37 


VI. — Chiffon .... 


47 


VII.— The Soldier . 


■ 59 


VIII.— The Navy 


■ 7i 


IX. — The Churches 


• 79 


X. — The Politician 


. 90 


XI. — Poets .... 


. 103 


XII. — Fiction .... 


■ 113 


XIII. SUBURBANISM . 


124 


XIV. — The Man-about-Town . 


■ 137 


XV.— Drink .... 


144 


XVI.— Food .... 


■ iS3 


XVII. — Law and Order 


. 163 


XVIII. — Education 


• 171 


XIX. — Recreation 


■ 183 


XX. — Stock Exchange 


192 


XXL— The Beloved . 


199 



111 



The Egregious English 



CHAPTER I 

APOLLO 

It has become the Englishman's habit, one 
might almost say the Englishman's instinct, 
to take himself for the head and front of the 
universe. The order of creation began, we 
are told, in protoplasm. It has achieved at 
length the Englishman. Herein are the cul- 
mination and ultimate glory of evolutionary 
processes. Nature, like the seventh-stand- 
ard boy in a board school, "can get no 
higher." She has made the Englishman, 
and her work therefore is done. For the 
continued progress of the world and all that 
in it is, the Englishman will make due 



2 The Egregious English 

provision. He knows exactly what is wanted, 
and by himself it shall be supplied. There 
is little that can be considered distinguish- 
ingly English which does not reflect this 
point of view. As an easy-going, entirely 
confident, imperturbable piece of arrogance, 
the Englishman has certainly no mammal- 
ian compeer. Even in the blackest of his 
troubles he perceives that he is great. "I 
shall muddle through/' he says. He is ex- 
pected and understood to muddle through; 
and, muddle through or not, he invariably 
believes he has done it. Sheer complacency 
bolsters him up on every hand. At his going 
forth the rest of the world is fain to abase 
itself in the dust. He is the strong man, the 
white man of white men. He is the rich, 
clean sportsman, the incomparable, the fear- 
less, the intolerable. And by " Englishman " 
the world has learned not to mean " Briton." 
The world has been taught to discriminate. 
It has regarded the Britannic brotherhood; 
and though it forgets that the Gael and the 
Celt are Britons, it takes its Englishman for 



Apollo 3 

a Briton, only with a difference. On the 
other hand, it is keenly sensible of sundry 
facts — as that it is the Englishman who rules 
the waves and the Englishman upon whose 
dominions the sun never sets ; that the British 
flag is the English flag, the British army the 
English army, and the British navy the Eng- 
lish navy, and that Scotland and Ireland, 
with Wales, are English appanages. It 
would be foolish to assert that the English- 
man has greatly concerned himself in either 
the promulgation or the acceptance of these 
notions. But he holds them dear, and they 
are ineradicably planted in his subconscious- 
ness. 

One is inclined to think, however, that, 
while the supremacy and superiority of the 
Englishman have been received without tra- 
verse in his own dominions, there are those 
in outer darkness — on the Continent, in Ire- 
land, and even in Scotland — who admit no 
such supremacy and no such superiority. 
Nay, there be persons breathing the breath 
of life who, so far from looking upon the 



4 The Egregious English 

Englishman with the eyes with which the 
early savage must have regarded Captain 
Cook, look upon him with the eyes with which 
Captain Cook regarded the early savage. In 
Ireland, particularly, hatred of the English 
has become a deep-grounded national charac- 
teristic. The French dislike of perfidious Al- 
bion may be reckoned to a great extent an 
intermittent matter. It sputters and flares 
when a Fashoda or a Boer War comes along, 
and it has a way of finding its deadliest ex- 
pression in caricature. But the Irish hatred 
is as persistent and concrete as it is ancient. 
In Scotland the feeling about the English 
amounts in the main to good-humoured tol- 
erance, touched with a certain amazement. 
The least cultivated of Scotsmen — and such 
a man is quite a different being from the 
least cultivated of Englishmen — will tell you 
that "thae English" are chiefly notable by 
reason of their profound ignorance and a 
ridiculous passion for the dissipation of 
money. The Scot of the middle class thinks 
his neighbour is a feckless, foolish person 



Apollo 5 

who would pass muster if he could be serious, 
and who has got what he possesses by good 
luck rather than by good management. Up 
to a point both are right, for the English in 
the mass are at once much more ignorant and 
much less thrifty than the people of Scot- 
land, and their good-nature and happy-go- 
luckiness are things to set a Scot moralising. 
Years ago Matthew Arnold put the right 
names on the two more creditable and 
powerful sections of English society. The 
aristocracy he set down for Barbarians, the 
middle class for Philistines. The aristo- 
cracy were inaccessible to ideas, he said ; the 
middle class admired and loved the aristo- 
cracy. It is so to this day, and so to an 
extent which is in entire consonance with the 
circumstance that for sheer stupidity the Eng- 
lishman of the upper class is without parallel, 
while the Englishman of the middle class can- 
not be paralleled for snobbishness. Arnold's 
complaint that neither class was a reading 
class or at all devoted to the higher matters 
still holds. The great, broad-shouldered, 



6 The Egregious English 

genial Englishman whom Tennyson sang 
and at whom Arnold gibed is still with us. 
That he is as great and as broad-shoul- 
dered and as genial as ever nobody will deny. 
And, broadly speaking, his outlook upon life 
remains exactly what it was. To be ruddy 
and healthy, to go out mornings with dogs, 
to dine hilariously and dance evenings, 
to be generous to the poor, and to hon- 
our oneself and the King are the rule of his 
life if he be a Barbarian ; and to ape these 
things and consider them gifts of price, if he 
be a Philistine. Since Arnold, however, the 
Englishman, egregious though he undoubt- 
edly was, has taken unto himself a new and 
altogether alarming demerit. Out of his love 
of health and ease and security and pleasure 
and well-ordered materialism there has sprung 
up a trouble which is like to cost him exceed- 
ing dear— a trouble, in fact, which, if he be 
not careful, will go far to emasculate him, if 
not wholly to destroy him. Of the higher 
matters, as has been said, he has taken but 
the smallest heed. Writer fellows, painter 



Apollo 7 

fellows, philosopher Johnnies, and so forth are 
not of his world, except in so far as they may- 
entertain his women-folk, or deck his halls 
with commercial canvas, or assist him in the 
eking out of his small talk before dessert. It 
is not to be expected of him that he should 
take to his heart persons whom he cannot by 
any possibility understand. Even Arnold 
could forgive him that failing. It was the 
build of the man, the breed and constitu- 
tion of him, that justified him. But since, 
being English, he has found his way to the 
unpardonable sin. It was well that he 
should despise persons who, however much 
they might think, did little and got little for 
doing it. It was well that brains which 
could not sit a horse, and preferred bed to 
the moors, and had no rent-roll, should be 
despised. It would have been well, too, if 
that other kind of brains, which, beginning 
with nothing, ends in millionairedom and 
flagrant barbarianism, might also have con- 
tinued to be despised and to be kept at arm's- 
length. The great, broad-shouldered, genial 



8 The Egregious English 

Englishman, however, has succumbed. Park 
Lane has become a Ghetto ; my lord's house 
parties reek of gentlemen with noses, and 
names ending in "baum"; and the English 
Houses of Parliament, the finest club in 
Europe, the mother of parliaments, the most 
dignified assemblage under the sun, is just a 
branch of the Stock Exchange. As the ex- 
ceedingly clever young man who recently 
wrote a book about the Scot might say, this 
shows what the English really are. 

It has been remarked, and possibly not 
without truth, that the Scot keeps the Sab- 
bath and everything else he can lay his hands 
upon. He is credited with being the per- 
fect money-grubber; his desire for compe- 
tence, we have been told by the clever young 
man before mentioned, has blighted his soul 
and brought him into opprobrium among 
Turks and Chinamen. Well, the Scot does 
look after money: he desires competence, he 
loves independence; and, when he can get 
them, ease and pleasure are gratifying to 
him. If he comes off the rock and at- 



Apollo 9 

tains affluence, he is not averse to the 
goodnesses that affluence commands. He 
will start a castle and a carriage and a 
coat-of-arms with the best of them ; he will 
lift up his family and leave his children 
well provided for. In these connections he 
is just as human as the next man; but he 
never has played and he never will play the 
English game of lavishness and wastefulness 
and swaggering profusion, and, least of all, 
will he play it on a basis of undesirable asso- 
ciation. The Scotsman who has compassed 
wealth, even though he be the son of a mole- 
catcher or a sweetie-wife or a Glasgow beer- 
seller, can always remember that there is 
such a thing as spiritual integrity. And 
though he may or may not boo and boo and 
boo in accordance with the good old kindly 
English legend, he certainly will not do it in 
Jews' houses. This, I take it, is where he 
has some little advantage over Englishmen. 
Perhaps no finer indication of the English 
spirit, and of the greed and corruption that 
have overtaken it, could have been offered 



io The Egregious English 

than has been offered by the trend of recent 
events in South Africa. To go thoroughly 
over the ground in such an essay as the 
present is, of course, impossible ; to state the 
arguments for both sides would be to repro- 
duce writing of which everybody is heartily 
tired. The battling newspapers have said 
their say, and we are just beginning to feel 
the comfort of a more or less reasonable 
settlement. All that need be said here is 
that the Englishman has not come out of 
this war with anything like the honour and 
the glory and the eclat that he has been ac- 
customed to expect of himself in similar 
undertakings. His bodily prowess, his hardi- 
hood, his Spartan capacity for withstanding 
the rigours of campaigning, his military abil- 
ities, and his very patriotism have all had to 
be called in question during the past two and 
a half years. When he went out to the fray, 
his cry was, " Ha! ha!" and the war was to 
be over in six weeks. He had the finest 
equipment, the finest munitions, the finest 
men, the finest system, the world had seen. 



Apollo 1 1 

He was as fit as a fiddle and as hard as nails, 
and his love of music prompted him to take 
a piano with him. Then the English and 
they that dwell in outer darkness saw many- 
things. They have been learning their les- 
son ever since. They have learned that in 
a fight the great, broad-shouldered, genial 
Englishman, instead of being worth three 
Frenchmen, is worth about the fiftieth part 
of a Boer farmer. They have learned that the 
great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman 
is not above selling spavined horses and 
stinking beef to the country that he loves. 
And they have learned that when a great, 
broad-shouldered, genial Englishman is dis- 
covered in his incompetence or his culpable 
negligence or his dishonour, it is the business 
of all the other great, broad-shouldered, gen- 
ial Englishmen to get round him and screen 
him from the public gaze and swear that he 
is a maligned and misunderstood man. The 
incidents of the war alone, without any back- 
ing or the smallest distortion or exaggera- 
tion, have been quite sufficient to show that 



i2 The Egregious English 



there is something rotten in the condition of 
the English. It has been a tale of shame 
and ignominy and disaster from beginning to 
end. It has resulted in a peace which prac- 
tically settles very little, and an inquiry with 
closed doors. Verily Apollo must have a 
care for his reputation in the Pantheon. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SPORTSMAN 

The Englishman who is not a sportsman 
dares not mention the circumstance. In the 
counties he must shoot and hunt, or be for 
ever damned. In the towns he must have 
daily dealings with a starting-price book- 
maker and hourly news from the race-courses 
and the cricket-pitches, otherwise English- 
men decline to know him. " I am a sports- 
man, sir," is the English shibboleth. "It is 
the English love of manly sports that has 
made the English paramount in every land 
and on every sea." The Lord Chief Justice 
of England rowed stroke for his college in 
Oxford v. Cambridge in 1815, otherwise he 
would not be Lord Chief Justice of England. 
At eighteen the Lord Chancellor was one of 
13 



1 4 The Egregious English 

the best sprinters of his day, otherwise he 
would never have dandled his little legs on 
the Woolsack. Sir Henry Campbell-Banner- 
man is a keen shot, and was one of a party 
of seven who made the biggest bag on record 
in 1865, otherwise he would never have been 
Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Henry La- 
bouchere is one of our most brilliant and 
daring steeple-chase riders, otherwise he 
would never have owned Truth. Mrs. Or- 
miston Chant is a cricket enthusiast ; so are 
the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Joseph 
Chamberlain, and Mr. Tommy Bowles. Lord 
Roberts can take a hand at croquet with the 
best young woman out of Girton, and Mr. 
John Morley understands a race-horse almost 
as well as he understands the Encyclopaedists. 
In fact, the English eminent are either sports- 
men or nothing, and all the other English 
follow suit. 

Now and again somebody gets up and 
points out that betting is a great evil ; where- 
upon the Duke of Devonshire opens one eye 
and says that he never had a shilling on 



The Sportsman 15 

a horse in his life. Then everybody says 
that horse-racing is good for the breed of 
horses, employing large amounts of capital 
and large numbers of honest persons, and on 
the whole a manly and profitable pastime. 
Incidentally, too, it transpires that fox- 
hunting is an equally noble and English 
form of sport, and that when farmers cease 
from puppy-walking, Britain may very well 
drop the epithet "Great" from her name. 
Or perhaps Mr. Kipling, fresh from the un- 
pleasant truths of South Africa, conceives a 
distich or two as to flannelled fools and mud- 
died oafs. In response there is an immediate 
and emphatic English howl. Why cannot 
the little man stick to his Recessionals ? How 
dare he call sportsmen like Ranji and Trott 
and Bloggs and Biffkin flannelled fools, much 
less the Tottenham Hotspurs and Sheffield 
United muddied oafs ! Is it not true that the 
battle of Waterloo was won on the playing- 
fields of Eton ? Were not flannelled fools and 
muddied oafs among the first to throw up 
their home ties and fling themselves into the 



1 6 The Egregious English 

imminent breach when the war broke out? 
Are not cricket and football healthy and ad- 
mirable old English sports, and pleasantly- 
calculated to keep the youth of the country 
out of much worse mischief on Saturday 
afternoons? And so on right down the line. 
The English are sportsmen. Sport is bred 
in the bone of them. Less than a century 
ago they were cock-fighting and man-fighting 
in the splendid English way. They would 
be doing it yet, if their own stupid laws did 
not prevent them. Instead they race horses 
and pursue the fox, watch cricket and foot- 
ball matches, and play tennis and croquet 
and ping-pong. It is sport that keeps Eng- 
land sweet. If it were not for sport, the 
English would cease to have red faces and 
husky voices and check suits. One pre- 
sumes, too, that if it were not for sport they 
would entirely lose their sense of fair play, 
their love of honest dealing, and that spirit 
of self-sacrifice which notoriously informs all 
their actions. It is sport that has made the 
English the just est as well as the greatest of 



The Sportsman 17 

the nations. It is sport which keeps her un- 
spotted of the lower vices, such as drunken- 
ness, indolence, and misspent Saturday after- 
noons. It is sport which gives her a standard 
of manliness, an all-day press, and a platform 
upon which prince and pauper, the highest 
and the lowest, meet as common men. Long 
live sport! 

Perhaps it is pardonable in a Scot to note 
that the only forms of sport which can be 
pronounced sane and devoid of offence came 
out of Scotland. The grand instance in 
point, of course, is the ancient and royal 
game of golf. Without attempting to say a 
word that would tend to exaggerate the 
value of a pastime which is beloved by all 
Scotsmen, and not without its appreciators 
even in England, it seems fitting to remark 
that in golf you have a game which, while 
every whit as healthy, as manly, and as in- 
vigorating as horse-racing, cricket, football, 
and the rest of them, can never by any 
chance become the mere kill-time of the idle, 
unparticipating spectator or the prey of the 



1 8 The Egregious English 

" professional," the ready-money bookmaker, 
and the halfpenny journal. As to other 
Scottish sports, one need not here particu- 
larise ; but they are all healthy and honest in 
the broadest sense, and with the single excep- 
tion of football, which has been corrupted by 
the English, they have not been allowed to 
deteriorate into vices. The exploitation of 
popular pastimes by covetous and unprin- 
cipled persons is an unmistakable sign of 
national decadence. In England that ex- 
ploitation goes on without let or hindrance 
and in almost every department. Protest 
brings merely contempt and objurgation 
upon the head of the protester, and the na- 
tional virility continues to be slowly but 
surely sapped away. That the English no- 
tion of sport should permit of the orgies 
of bloodshed, rowdyism, and partisanship 
which take place in the coverts and on foot- 
ball-fields, race-courses, and cricket-grounds 
serves to indicate that, in spite of all that 
has been said and sung in its praises, the 
English notion of sport is an exceedingly sad 



The Sportsman 19 

and sorry one. It is natural that a people 
given over to display and the getting of 
money for the sake of the more unnecessary 
luxuries money can buy should in a great 
measure lose its taste for outdoor sports of 
the primal order. The English are losing 
that taste at a rate which can leave no doubt 
as to the ultimate upshot. In brief, the Eng- 
lishman as sportsman worth the name seems 
to be disappearing ; and in his place England 
will have the adipose, plethoric, mechanical 
slayer of birds who goes to his shoot in a 
bath-chair, and the cadaverous, undersized, 
Saturday-afternoon zealot, the chief joys of 
whose existence are the cracking of filberts 
and the kicking of umpires. 



CHAPTER III 

THE MAN OF BUSINESS 

The English, all the world has heard, 
are a nation of shopkeepers. They are un- 
derstood to keep shop and to glory in it. 
They have kept shop, with the other na- 
tions for customers, ever since international 
shopkeeping became a possibility. In the 
beginning, one is afraid, their notion of 
shopkeeping ran neither to fair trade nor 
honest dealing ; but gradually there was built 
up a system of commercial equity, the main 
principle of which was the protection of one 
shopkeeper against another and the security 
of shopkeepers generally. 

In course of time the English man of 
business arose. He had a silk hat and ex- 
pansive manners. He lived in a suburb 
20 



The Man of Business 21 

and read the Times on his way to busi- 
ness in the morning. All day at his office 
he would cheat no man, and his word was 
as good as his bond. His office day was 
a day of quite ten hours, and during those 
ten hours he sweated like the proverbial 
nigger. At nights he retired to his suburb, 
and, with the wife and children whom he 
kept there, ate to repletion from the joint, 
washed it down with sherry and port sup- 
plied to him by merchants of the type of the 
late Mr. Ruskin's father; and, hey, presto! 
by eleven of the clock he was deep among the 
feathers. Twice on Sundays he went to 
church and held the plate. To Sunday's 
midday dinner he invited the vicar or a 
curate, and there was always beef and batter- 
pudding and improving talk, not to mention 
cabbage and an extra special ' ' glass of wine, 
sir." Other recreations the English man of 
business had none, save and except perhaps 
an occasional Saturday-afternoon drive in a 
hired chaise with Mrs. Man-of-Business and 
the children, and a still more occasional visit 



22 The Egregious English 

to the theatre. In the long run, by the 
practice of these virtues he amassed wealth. 
He put his money into good bottoms; he 
owed no man a penny; and as he never 
robbed anybody and always lived miles 
within his income, he had a conscience so 
easy that it seemed to sleep. Everybody 
respected him. He was in demand to take 
the chair at the meetings of young men's 
improvement societies, and to explain the 
secret of his success ''free, gratis, and for 
nothing" to the callow young men thereat 
assembled. He would tell you unctuously 
that he attributed his success (i) to early 
rising, (2) to never wasting time [the split 
infinitive was his], (3) to always saving at 
least one third of his income, (4) to never 
going bond for anybody, and (5) to marrying 
Mrs. Man-of-Business — this last, of course, 
with a chortle. So he wagged along and 
helped to build up the commercial greatness 
and probity and honour of his country. And 
when he died he had a magnificent and costly 
funeral and was attended to his last long 



The Man of Business 23 

home by his weeping relict and sorrowing 
sons and daughters. Next day there was an 
account of Mr. Man-of- Business' s obsequies 
in the local papers, and his sons proceeded to 
carry on the concern. 

That was forty years ago. To-day the 
English man of business is a bird of an en- 
tirely different and altogether more entranc- 
ing feather. Indeed, it is a question whether 
he has not ceased to be a man of business at 
all. One might perhaps sum him up best by 
saying that he has begun to have notions. 
Whereas he was once the bulwark of the 
Philistine class, he has now gone over, lock, 
stock, and barrel — particularly barrel — to 
the Barbarians. He lives in the manner, 
style, and odour of Barbarism ; and the ruling 
ambition of his existence is to pass for a 
" county magnate," a man of birth and leis- 
ure, rather than for a man of business. So 
that he has entirely laid aside the character- 
istics which distinguished his early and mid- 
dle Victorian prototype. Breadth, girth, 
weight, the substantial, the ponderous, are 



24 The Egregious English 

not for him. He does not attribute his suc- 
cess to early rising ; he does not boast that 
his word is his bond; he does not slap his 
sides when he laughs ; he never went to busi- 
ness on a tram-car in his life ; and as for his 
owing all he is to Mrs. Man-of-Business, it is 
to his association with that charming be- 
chiffoned, bejewelled little lady that he owes 
all he owes. In other words, the new Eng- 
lish man of business has made up his mind 
that, if life is to be made tolerable at all, it 
must be made tolerable through social ways. 
That is to say, if one's income runs to a couple 
of thousand a year out of a butter business, 
one must live in precisely the manner of per- 
sons whose incomes run to two thousand a 
year out of lands and hereditaments. "The 
glass of fashion and the mould of form' ' for a 
person who would live is Mayfair. Lords 
and dukes and the landed gentry have 
houses in Mayfair; their wives and female 
relatives flutter round in flashing equipages 
and brilliant toilettes ; there is the theatre, 
the opera, and other people's houses in the 



The Man of Business 25 

evening, the Park on Sundays, the river in the 
summer, Scotland in the autumn, and the 
Riviera for the winter and early spring. 
Lords and dukes and the landed gentry tread 
this pretty round, and find both pleasure and 
dignity in it. Why not the head of the old- 
established firm of Margarine, Sons, Bros. 
& Co.? Why not, indeed? Old Margarine, 
founder of the house, never missed a day at 
the office for forty years. Young Margarine 
will tell you that, " after all, you know, it is 
rather amusing to drop into the office some- 
times and see the fellows sit up." All the 
same, the business is a beastly bore, and 
there are moments when he wishes it at the 
deuce. 

As for Mrs. Margarine, Mrs. Man-of- 
Business, the erstwhile portly mother of 
daughters and only begetter of her spouse's 
success, really, if you saw her in her boudoir, 
in her carriage, at Princes, at the opera, at 
Brighton, or at Monte Carlo, you would not 
recognise her. She is young and slim; her 
hair is of flax ; she has rings on her fingers, 



26 The Egregious English 

and probably bells on her toes; her dia- 
monds are the envy of duchesses; "and as 
for Margarine, my dear, I never think either 
about it or him. My little boys are at Eton, 
and Dickie is going into the Guards." Some- 
times even Mr. and Mrs. Man-of-Business 
manage to get presented. Then, as you may 
say, their cup runneth over; hand in hand 
they stand upon their Pisgah and stare at the 
Pacific as it were. There are no more worlds 
to conquer. They come down with a light 
upon their faces, and Margarine, Sons, Bros. 
& Co. can be hanged. In point of fact, Mar- 
garine, Sons, Bros. & Co. sooner or later be- 
comes Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co., Limited. 
Margarine himself drops out, taking with him 
all the money he can get. When he comes 
to die, if you said " Margarine," he would do 
his best to insult you. 

That is all. Of course, I have taken an 
extreme case, but apparently the desire of 
the latter-day English man of business is 
wholly in these directions. Be he in a great 
or small way, he is fain to step westward ; he 



The Man of Business 27 

is fain to live as the Barbarians and to be 
undistinguishable from them. And rather 
than be beaten he will enter into that king- 
dom piecemeal. Surpluses that would have 
gone to consolidation and extension in the 
old days now go to personal and feminine 
expenditure. Bond Street captures what the 
wise would have dumped into Threadneedle 
Street ; and instead of resting our hope upon 
the business methods of Benjamin Franklin 
and Samuel Budgett, our heart inclines to 
the excellent precepts of our millionaire 
friend " Yeth Indeed." Which is to say that 
the English man of business, like the English 
sportsman, is dying out of the land. Whether 
his loss will be deplored by countless thou- 
sands is another question. Anyway, he is 
going. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE JOURNALIST 

I am dealing here with the English jour- 
nalist, because in my opinion, after the Eng- 
lish sportsman and the English man of 
business, there is nothing under the sun so 
wonderfully English and so fearfully foolish. 
The elegant and austere writer who gave us 
The Unspeakable Scot has said much which 
he no doubt hoped would lead people to be- 
lieve that the British Press was entirely in 
the hands of Scotsmen, and that this ac- 
counted at once for its dulness and its con- 
tinual advertisement of Scottish virtues. For 
my own part, I have no hesitation in assert- 
ing that Mr. Crosland's view of the situation 
is quite a mistaken one. In any case, it is 

obvious that, even if Fleet Street be, as Mr. 

28 



The Journalist 29 

Crosland suggests, eaten up with louts from 
over the Border, the English journalist is not 
yet wholly extinct, and somewhere in the 
land the remnant of him stands valiantly to 
its guns. It is well known, however, that, 
as a fact, the remnant very largely outnum- 
bers its hated rival, the proportion of Scots 
to the proportion of Englishmen on the 
staffs of most newspapers being probably 
no higher than as one is to three. So that 
for the stodginess and flat-footedness of the 
English newspaper — the epithets are Mr. 
Crosland' s own — the Englishman is at least 
equally to blame with the Scot. Mr. Cros- 
land' s main complaint against the newspaper 
press of his country is that it lacks brilliance. 
So far as I am aware, it has never before been 
asserted that the function of a newspaper is 
to be brilliant. News is news all over the 
world. To write brilliantly of a dog-fight or 
of the suicide of a defaulting clerk may be 
Mr. Crosland 's ambition in life, but most per- 
sons possessing such an ambition would trans- 
fer their finical attentions from the field 



30 The Egregious English 

of journalism to that of belles-lettres. No 
doubt, if Mr. Crosland had his way, the morn- 
ing papers, in which the soul of the average 
Englishman so delighteth, would be pub- 
lished from the Bodley Head or at the Sign of 
the Unicorn, or haply at Mr. Grant Richards's. 
It is not my intention, however, to enter 
into a sort of ten nights' discussion with Mr. 
Crosland. He has had his say and taken the 
whipping he deserved. My business is with 
the English journalist ; and while I shall not 
descend to personalities in dealing with him, 
I hope to show that his brilliance and liveli- 
ness and smartness, though much vaunted, 
are neither a boon nor a blessing either to 
journalism as a force or to society at large. 
I think that it may be fairly set down for a 
fact that the fine flower and consummate ex- 
pression of English journalism is the half- 
penny newspaper. At any rate, nobody would 
pretend to find in the halfpenny news- 
paper the sententious dulness and flat-f ooted- 
ness which are supposed to characterise the 
j ournalistic work of the Scot . The smartness 



The Journalist 3 1 

of the halfpenny press is indeed not even 
American. There is but one epithet for it, 
and that is English. Broadly speaking, its 
appeal is directly and exclusively to the 
bathotic. In England the bathotic has 
always had the majority in its grip. The 
majority notoriously has no mind. It is a 
thing of one emotion, an instrument of one 
stop. On that stop — the bathotic stop — the 
English journalist makes a point of playing. 
There has been a time in his history when he 
believed in the educative possibilities and 
duties of his profession. He long held with 
the Scot that the Press was a power, and 
that it was becoming that it should glory in 
being a power for the betterment of the race. 
After many shrewd searchings and commer- 
cial gropings, the English journalist discov- 
ered that the way to fame and fortune lay in 
the mastery of the bathotic stop. He learned 
to sing songs of Araby in one squalid key 
every morning, and he has since been able to 
keep a gig and out-circulate everything that 
considers itself possessed of circulation. He 



3 2 The Egregious English 

has played, as one might say, old Harvey with 
the Daily Telegraph. He has put the Times to 
the shame of being a journal that " nobody 
reads." More than all, he has said flatly to 
the English people, " You are a rabbit-brained 
crowd, and here for your delectation and 
your coppers is the worst that can be writ- 
ten for you." 

When England comes to her day of reck- 
oning, in the hour when she shall see her 
own mischance and is fain to remember 
the names of her destroyers, none of them 
will seem to her so flagrant and so to be 
deprecated as the English journalist. "Be- 
hold," she will say, "the monster who con- 
vinced me that it was beautiful to split 
infinitives; that it was elegant to begin six 
paragraphs on one page with the blessed 
statement, ' A dramatic scene was enacted in 
Mr. Thingamybob's court yesterday'; that 
good books are to be worthily pronounced 
upon by sub-editors in the intervals of wait- 
ing for the three o'clock winner; and 
that, so far from being a reproach to one, 



The Journalist 33 

the bathotic was the only honourable and 
creditable attitude of mind." 

If a man wish to perceive to what degraded 
passes the art of writing may come and yet 
retain the qualities of intelligibility and ap- 
parent reasonableness, let him peruse the 
morning papers and die the death. The 
reek and offence of them smells to heaven. 
They are a sure indication of the decadence 
of the English mind and of the cupidity and 
unscrupulousness of the English journalist. 
There has been nothing like them, nothing to 
compare with them, for cheapness and futility 
and banality in the history of the world. They 
are more to be fearful of than the pestilence, 
inasmuch as they spell intellectual debase- 
ment, the corruption of the public taste, and 
the defilement of the public spirit. Their very 
literal innocuousness condemns them. It is 
their boast that they may be read in the fam- 
ily without a blush. Their assumption of 
morality and puritanical straitlacedness is 
admirable. Beneath it there lie a licentious- 
ness of purpose, a disregard for what is just, 

3 



34 The Egregious English 

and a contempt for what is decent and of 
good report which are calculated to make the 
angels weep. When one inquires into the 
personnel of the staffs by which these papers 
are run, one is confronted with exactly the 
kind of man one expects to meet. First of 
all, he is English, and as shallow and flippant 
and irresponsible as only an Englishman can 
be. The saving touch of seriousness does 
not enter into his composition. He neither 
reads nor thinks. Beer, billiards, and free 
lunches, free entry to the less edifying places 
of amusement, a minimum of work and a 
maximum of pay, constitute his ideal of the 
journalist's career, and he is always doing his 
best to live up to it. Of responsibility to 
anybody save his immediate chief, who, after 
all, is only himself at a little higher salary, he 
has not the smallest notion. His duty is 
neither by himself nor by the public. All 
that is expected of him is loyalty to his chief 
and to his paper, and it is his pride and joy 
that this loyalty is invariably forthcoming. 
Very occasionally one hears that, in con- 



The Journalist 35 

sequence of a change in the political policy 
of a newspaper, the editor of that paper has 
considered it to be his duty to resign his edi- 
torship. Probably not more than two such 
resignations have occurred in English jour- 
nalism during the past twenty years. In 
both instances the self-denying editors have 
been held up by the English papers as sub- 
lime examples of honour and martyrdom. 
That there is nothing extraordinary in stick- 
ing to one's principles, even though it means 
loss of livelihood, does not appear to have 
dawned upon the lively English mind. Of 
course, it will be said that, if every member 
of the staff of a newspaper, down even to the 
junior reporters, were allowed to have be- 
liefs and principles, and were not expected to 
write anything in antagonism to them, an 
exceedingly remarkable kind of newspaper 
would result. Compromise, at any rate on 
established matters, must be the rule of 
the journalist's life. On the other hand, I 
incline to the opinion that the English 
journalist is far too swift to acquiesce in 



36 The Egregious English 

doubtful procedure, and that where the mor- 
als, good report, and high character of a paper 
are concerned it is better to have a Scotch 
staff than an English one. Nothing is more 
characteristic of the English journalist of to- 
day than the circumstance that he is literally 
without opinions of his own. He takes his 
opinions from his chiefs, just as his chiefs 
take their opinions from their proprietors, or 
from the wire-pullers with whose party the 
paper happens to be associated. In a sense 
it is impossible that it should be otherwise. 
Yet you will find that in the main Scottish 
journalists do have opinions of their own, and 
that somehow they manage to be loyal to 
them. For weal or woe the Scot is immov- 
able and unchangeable as the granite of his 
own hills. You can never get him to see that 
half-measures are either desirable or neces- 
sary. He will not stretch his conscience nor 
palter with his soul for any man or any man's 
money. The Englishman is all the other way 
— that is why he makes such a nimble and 
even brilliant journalist. 



CHAPTER V 

THE EMPLOYED PERSON 

The English are a nation of employed per- 
sons. Wherever you go, from Berwick to 
Land's End, you will find that in the main 
the men you meet are somebody's employees. 
The better kind of them possibly write " man- 
ager" on their cards; some of them even are 
managing directors; others, again, are part- 
ners in wealthy houses or heads of such 
houses. Yet, as I have said, they strike you 
almost to a man as being in somebody's em- 
ployment. Even the most prosperous of 
them have the strained, repressed, furtive 
look which comes of the long turning of other 
people's little wheels; while the masses, the 
employed English masses, give you, as re- 
gards appearance, physique, and habit of 

37 



38 The Egregious English 

mind alike, an excellent notion of what a 
galley-slave must have been. The fact of 
being employed is indeed the only big and 
abiding fact in the average Englishman's life. 
It has its effect on the whole man from the 
time of his youth to the time of his death ; it 
influences his actions and the trend of his 
thoughts to a far greater extent than any 
other force — love and religion included. In 
the Englishman's view, to be employed is the 
only road to subsistence, and, if one be am- 
bitious, the only road to honour. He must 
work for somebody, otherwise he cannot be 
happy. The notion of working for himself 
appals him ; and if by any chance he be per- 
suaded to take the plunge, the consideration 
that he has no master weighs so heavily upon 
him that his end is usually speedy ruin of one 
sort or another. That is to say, he either 
takes advantage of his freedom to the extent 
of doing no work at all, or, in the absence of 
the guiding hand, he loses his judgment and 
throws to the winds the caution that kept 
him his place. It is a pity, there can be no 



The Employed Person 39 

doubt ; but the thing is in the English blood. 
If you are an Englishman, you must be em- 
ployed ; if you are unemployed, you are un- 
happy, and worse. For a full century the 
rich merchants, enterprising manufacturers, 
colliery-owners, mill-owners, and what not, 
in whom the English put their trust, have 
been preaching and fomenting this doctrine 
by every means in their power. To their aid 
in spreading the glorious truth they have 
brought the moralists and the Churches : " ' if 
a man will not work, neither shall he eat.' 
' Servants, obey your masters.' Punctuality 
is the soul of business. Be faithful over a 
few things. Begin at the bottom rung of the 
ladder. Mr. So-and-so, the notorious bil- 
lionaire, was once a poor working-boy in 
Manchester. Furthermore, if you don't work 
and at our price — well, to say the least of it, 
God will not love you." 

And the English — poor bodies! — carry on 
their lives accordingly. The whole scheme 
of things is arranged to fit in with the ideas 
of employers as to what work means, under 



4o The Egregious English 

what conditions it should be performed, and 
what should be its rewards. To live in the 
manner pronounced to be respectable by the 
moralists and the Churches, you must take 
upon yourself exactly the labours, and no 
others, prescribed by the employers. In 
other words, to keep an eight-roomed house 
with a piano in it, a wife with blouses and 
four new hats a year, and a little family who 
can go to church on Sunday mornings dressed 
as well as any of them, you must keep Messrs. 
Reachemdown's books, and pass through 
your hands many thousands of Messrs. 
Reachemdown's moneys, for a salary of £150 
a year. When you get old and half blind 
through years of poring over Reachemdown's 
figures, they will pension you off at a pound 
a week, and get a younger man to do the 
work for the other £2. You, good, easy 
Englishman, will, in your heart of hearts, 
be exceedingly grateful to Reachemdown & 
Reachemdown, and count it not the least of 
your many blessings that you have never 
wanted good work and kind employers. You 



The Employed Person 4 1 

will say to your English son, " My boy, make 
up your mind to serve people well, and in 
your old age they will never forget you. 
Always be industrious, obliging, and respect- 
ful. Remember that a rolling stone gathers 
no moss, and never forsake the substance for 
the shadow. " And the chances are that your 
fine English boy will do exactly what you, 
his fine English father, have done. Indeed, 
if he be old enough at the time of your "re- 
tirement," he might very appropriately take 
your place at Reachemdown & Reachem- 
down's; then he will marry, he will live in a 
house with a piano in it, his wife will have 
four new hats a year, and his children will go 
to church on Sundays as well dressed as any 
of them. 

On the whole, I should be sorry to say 
that this sort of thing was not desirable. If 
a nation is to be great, it is essential that it 
should contain a large body of workers, and 
the more industrious and dependable and 
trustworthy that body of workers, the better 
it is for the State and for the pillars and props 



42 The Egregious English 

of the State, the employers included. But 
the point is that the English take too much 
credit for it and get too much ease out of it. 
It has been complained by Mr. Crosland and 
other masters of elegant English that the 
Scot goes to London and the smaller indus- 
trial markets and there enters into successful 
competition with the English employed, and 
it appears to annoy Mr. Crosland that the 
Scot should not be content with good work, 
say book-keeping from nine to six, good 
wages, say £150 per annum, and kind em- 
ployers, say Messrs. Reachemdown & Reach- 
emdown, all his life. It seems to annoy him, 
too, that the Scot never acquires that pa- 
thetic satisfaction in being employed which 
permeates the beautiful spirit of his English 
competitor. You will meet hoary and bald- 
headed Englishmen who will tell you with a 
quaver that they have been in the employ- 
ment of one and the same house, man and 
boy, for over half a century, sir! Somehow 
the Englishman tells you this with a look of 
pride, and rather expects you to regard him 



The Employed Person 43 

as a sort of marvel. It never occurs to him 
that he is really bragging of his own inepti- 
tude, — to use Mr. Crosland's favourite ab- 
straction, — his own lack of enterprise. The 
number of Scots who have been in the em- 
ployment of one house for forty years, least 
of all the number of Scots who brag about 
it, is probably not a round dozen. As a gen- 
eral rule, when a Scot has been in a house 
forty years, it is his house. 

Another matter in which the English em- 
ployee appears to me to err mightily is his 
treatment of his employer. In concerns of 
great magnitude personal relations between 
employer and employed are often impossi- 
ble, because the employer seldom comes near 
the place where his money is made for him. 
Quite frequently, however, he is accessible; 
yet the employee knows him not. He would 
no more think of walking up and shaking 
hands with him than he would think of 
casting himself from the top of the factory 
chimney-stack. It is the unwritten law of 
the English that the employer is a better man 



44 The Egregious English 

than the employed. For the employee to 
say " How do ! " to the employer ; for the em- 
ployee to meet the employer in the street and 
omit to make respectful obeisances; for the 
employee to assert anywhere outside his fa- 
vourite pot-house that Jack's as good as his 
master, would never do. If you are paid 
wages, you must be grateful and respectful; 
and though you know quite well that your 
employer is paying you just as little as ever 
he can, you must still respect him. Broadly 
speaking, we manage these things better in 
Scotland ; and, for that matter, the Scot man- 
ages them better in England. The English 
employee quirks and crawls before his em- 
ployer, because he knows that his employer 
can exercise over him powers which, if they 
do not mean exactly life and death, do mean 
a possibly long period of out-of-workness. 
And out-of-workness is, as a rule, the most 
fearful thing in life that can happen to an 
Englishman, for the simple reason that he 
never has anything behind him. If he has 
been earning fifty pounds a year, he has 



The Employed Person 45 

spent it all; if he has been earning a thou- 
sand a year, he has spent it all and more to 
it. With the Scot it is different. No matter 
how small his earnings, he invariably con- 
trives to save a portion of them. When he 
has saved a hundred pounds, he is practically 
an independent man, for a Scot with a hun- 
dred pounds at his disposal can defy, and can 
afford to defy, any employer that ever 
breathed the breath of life. Besides, hun- 
dred pounds or no hundred pounds, the Scot 
will not grovel. He does his work and his 
duty, and the rest can go hang. His days 
are not spent in blissful contemplation of the 
joys of being in good work; he has no anxi- 
eties as to how long it is going to last; he 
admits no superiorities; he is afraid of no 
man. Some day, perhaps, the Englishman 
will learn to take a leaf out of his book. The 
Englishman will learn that to be employed, 
excepting with a view to greater things than 
subsistence, is to be in a condition which 
borders very closely on degradation. He 
will learn that services rendered and energies 



4 6 The Egregious English 

expended for long periods of years without 
adequate reward, and with only a pretence 
at advancement, are a discredit and not an 
honour. He will learn that a man 's a man, 
and that it is no man's business to be so 
faithful to another man that he cannot be 
faithful to himself. 



CHAPTER VI 

CHIFFON 

It pains me beyond measure to say it, but 
I think there can be no doubt that the ac- 
cumulated experience and wisdom of man- 
kind goes to show that at the bottom of most 
troubles there is a woman. Since Eve and 
the first debacle, it has been woman all along 
the line. I do not say that it is her fault, 
but the fact remains. White hands cling to 
the bridle-rein, and the horse proceeds ac- 
cordingly. It is woman that shapes our 
ends, rough-hew them as we will. She has a 
delicate finger in everybody's pie. No mat- 
ter who you are, some woman has got you by 
a little bit of string. Occasionally you are 
the better for being so entangled; but nine 
times out of ten it is a misfortune for you. 

47 



48 The Egregious English 

When one comes to look closely at the de- 
cadence of the English, and endeavours to 
account for it in a plain way and without 
fear or prejudice, one cannot help perceiving 
that here again one has a pronounced case of 
woman, woman, woman. Further, — and 
once more I pray that I may not seem impo- 
lite, — the woman with whom you have to 
contend in England, though her hand be full 
of power, is not, perhaps, a woman, after all. 
I sometimes think that she may be best and 
most properly expressed in the word " Chif- 
fon." Whatever she may have been in the 
past, however sweet, however demure, how- 
ever capable, however beautiful, the English- 
woman of to-day is just a foolish doll, a thing 
of frills and fluff and patchouli, a daughter 
of vanity, and a worshipper of dressmakers. 
Under her little foot, under her mild, blue, 
greedy eye, the Englishman has become a 
capering carpet-knight, one who dallies at 
high noon, a buck, a dandy, an unconvinced 
flippancy, the shadow of his former self. Be 
he father or merely husband of the fair, his 



Chiffon 49 

case is pretty much the same. Both at home 
(if he can find it in his heart to call his 
conglomeration of cosey-corners home) and 
abroad it is Chiffon that runs him. Chiffon 
must have a house full of fal-lals: so must 
the Englishman. Chiffon delights in Chip- 
pendale that a sixteen-stone male person dare 
not sit upon : so does the Englishman. Chif- 
fon must dine late off French kickshaws with 
champagne to them: so must the English- 
man. Chiffon must not have more than two 
children, whom she must visit and kiss once 
a day : it is the same with the Englishman. 
Chiffon does not like the way in which you 
are running your newspaper: the English- 
man forthwith runs his newspaper another 
way. Chiffon does not like that cross-eyed 
clerk of yours; she is sure there is some- 
thing wrong about him ; she would n't trust 
him with a hairpin, my dear ! He gets fired. 
Chiffon is fond of motor-cars and tiaras of 
diamonds and eight-guinea hats and three or 
four new frocks a week, and she hates to be 
worried about money matters. " Poor little 



50 The Egregious English 

Chiffon!" says the good, kind Englishman; 
"she shall be happy, even though we drift 
sweetly toward Carey Street. We must keep 
it up, though the heavens fall; and when I 
come to think of it, I have read somewhere 
of a man who had only £500 year, and is 
now in receipt of £16,000 simply through 
marrying an expensive wife." Lower down 
the scale it is just the same : Chiffon will have 
this, Chiffon will have that, and so will the 
Englishman. It is only four-three a yard, 
and it will make up lovely ! The Englishman 
never doubts that it will. Chiffon discovers 
that Chiffon next door has got an oak par- 
lour-organ and a case of birds on the instal- 
ment system. "She is getting them off a 
Scotsman," says Chiffon; "and I want 
some too." "Dry those pretty eyes," says 
the Englishman ; " I will apply at once for an 
extra two-bob a week, and it shall be done." 
The children of Chiffon next door are " tak- 
ing music lessons off a lidy in reduced circum- 
stances." Chiffon's children are as good as 
the children of Chiffon next door any day in 



Chiffon 5 1 

the week — they, too, shall take music lessons. 
The Englishman concurs. 

This, of course, is all when you are mar- 
ried to her. When you are Chiffon's fiance 
(she would not have you say sweetheart or 
lover for worlds), you enjoy what is com- 
monly called in England a high old time. 
First of all, she will flirt with you till your 
reason rocks upon its throne. Then, when 
you are about as confused as a little boy who 
has fallen out of a balloon, she brings you 
to the idiot-point, informs you that it is so 
sudden and that she does n't quite know what 
you mean, and asks you if you do not think 
it would have been more manly on your part 
to have spoken first with her papa. Being 
an Englishman, and having nothing better 
to do, you put up with it and go guiltily off 
to Chiffon's delectable male parent. He in- 
quires into your income in pretty much the 
manner of a person who is going to lend you 
£20 on note of hand only, grunts a bit, asks 
to be excused while he has a word with the 
missis ; comes back, says, " Yes, you can have 



52 The Egregious English 

her," and next morning you find yourself on 
the same old stool, in front of the same old 
shiny desk, wondering what in the name of 
heaven you have done. There is a three- 
years' courtship, all starch and theatre-tickets 
and bouquets and fretfulness and anxiety; 
there is a wedding pageant, got up specially 
for the purpose of annoying the neighbours; 
you have a whirling twenty minutes before 
a company of curates, who persist in calling 
you by the wrong name; you go home in 
shivers ; you drink soda-water to prevent you 
from getting drunk; you make a speech in 
the tone of a man who has just been hung; 
you find yourself feeling rather queer aboard 
the Dover packet, — and Chiffon is yours. 
Such an experience at a time of life when a 
man is callow, shy, full of nerves, and un- 
versed in the serious matters of life is bound 
to leave its mark upon the character. It 
takes the heart out of most men, and some 
of them never get it back again. It is an 
English institution and a stupid one. Like 
many another English institution, it has its 



Chiffon 53 

basis in pretentiousness and display, instead 
of in the vital issues of life. In Scotland we 
make marriages on different and more serious 
principles. There are no Chiffons in Scot- 
land, whether maids or matrons. Conse- 
quently in Scotland there are precious few 
fools. Hard heads, sound sense, high spirits, 
indomitable will, inexhaustible energy, are 
not the offspring of mammas who know more 
about cosmetics than about swaddling- 
clothes, and who suckle their children out of 
patent-food tins. One of the rebukers of Mr. 
Crosland has pointed out with some pertin- 
ence that the Scotswoman approximates 
more closely to the Wise Man's view of what 
a good wife should be than almost any other 
kind of woman in the world. Here, as Mr. 
Crosland would say, is Solomon : 

Who can find a virtuous woman ? for her price is far 
above rubies. 

The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, 
so that he shall have no need of spoil. 

She will do him good and not evil all the days of her 
life. 

She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly 
with her hands. 



54 The Egregious English 

She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her 
food from afar. 

She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat 
to her household, and a portion to her maidens. 

She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit 
of her hands she planteth a vineyard. 

She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengthen- 
ed her arms. 

She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her 
candle goeth not out by night. 

She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands 
hold the distaff. 

She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she 
reacheth forth her hands to the needy. 

She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for 
all her household are clothed with scarlet. 

Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth 
among the elders of the land. 

She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth 
girdles unto the merchant. 

Strength and honour are her clothing: and she shall 
rejoice in time to come. 

She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her 
tongue is the law of kindness. 

She looketh well to the ways of her household, and 
eateth not the bread of idleness. 

Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her hus- 
band also, and he praiseth her. 

Yes, Mr. Crosland, it is "very, very, very 
Scotch." What poor little Chiffon would 
think of it, if it were put before her as a stan- 
dard of wifely qualification and duty, nobody 
but the Englishman knows. Perhaps she 



Chiffon 55 

would shrug her shoulders and say, "How 
absurd!" Perhaps she would not under- 
stand it at all. 

The Englishwoman's love of petty display 
and cheap fripperies, her desire to outshine 
the neighbours and to put all she has on her 
back, and to pass everywhere for a woman 
of means and station, no doubt had its be- 
ginning in a laudable anxiety to make the 
best of things. Unfortunately, however, the 
tendency has been developed out of reason, 
to the neglect of the qualities which make a 
woman the inspiration and strength of a 
man's life. To dress, and to talking and 
thinking about it, the Englishwoman devotes 
unconscionable hours. The bare business of 
robing and disrobing takes up pretty well half 
her waking day. Her transference from the 
bath to the breakfast-table cannot be accom- 
plished under fifty minutes. Before she will 
appear in the open she will make yet another 
toilet. She is a full twenty minutes tidying 
herself before lunch. In the afternoon there 
is an hour of getting into tea-gowns; and, 



5 6 The Egregious English 

crowning rite of all, my lady " strips" for 
dinner. From morn to dewy eve her little 
mind is busy with dress. The shopping, over 
which she makes such a fuss, is almost in- 
variably a matter of new frocks, new hats, 
new shoes, new feathers, matching this, ex- 
changing that, sitting on high stools before 
pomatumed counter-skippers, and dissipat- 
ing, in the purchase of sheer superfluities, 
gold that men have toiled for. Her visiting 
is equally an unmitigatedly dressy matter; 
she goes to see her friends' frocks, not her 
friends, and it is the delight of her soul to 
turn up in toilettes which render her friends 
frankly and miserably envious. Of the real 
purport of clothes she knows nothing; and 
if you endeavour to explain it to her, she 
will charge you with the wish to make an old 
frump of her before her time. As for the ex- 
pense of it all, she never bothers her pretty 
head about money matters; she tells you in 
the most childlike way that her account at 
the bank seems to be perpetually overdrawn, 
but that " Randall is a dear, kind boy, 



Chiffon 57 

though he does swear a bit when some of the 
bills come in. Besides," she says, "I am 
sure it helps him in his profession to have a 
well-dressed wife." 

And the pity of it is, that quite frequently 
the person upon which these adornments are 
lavished is really not worth the embellish- 
ment, and would indeed be far better served 
and make a far better show in the least elab- 
orate of garments. For, notoriously, the 
physique of the Englishwoman of the middle 
and upper classes is not now what it was. In 
height, in figure, in suppleness and grace of 
build, the Scottish woman can give her Eng- 
lish sister many points. In the matter of 
facial beauty, too, the Englishwoman cannot 
be said particularly to shine. At a Drawing- 
Room, at the opera, the beauty of England 
spreads itself for your gaze ; and the amazing 
lack both of beauty and the promise of it 
appals you. If we are to believe the society 
papers, there is not an ugly nor a plain-feat- 
ured woman of means in all broad England. 
Every week the English illustrated journals 



5 8 The Egregious English 

give you pages of photographs, beneath 
which you may read in entrancing capital 
letters, "The beautiful Miss Snooks," or 
' 'Lady Beertap's two beautiful daughters." 
Yet the merest glance at those photographs 
convinces you that Miss Snooks is about as 
good-looking as the average kitchen- wench, 
while the two beautiful daughters of Lady 
Beertap have faces like the backs of cabs. 
The fact is, that the so-called English beauty 
is a rare thing and a fragile thing. Fully 
seventy-five per cent, of Englishwomen are 
not beautiful to look upon. Of the other 
twenty-five per cent., one here and there — 
perhaps one in a thousand — could stand be- 
side the Venus of Milo without blenching. 
For the rest, they have a girlish prettiness 
which accompanies them into their thirtieth 
year, and sickens slowly into a sourness. At 
forty, little Chiffon, who was so pretty at 
twenty, has crow's-feet and flat cheeks, and 
a distinct tendency to the nut-cracker type of 
profile. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE SOLDIER 

"With a tow-row-row-row-row-row for 
the British Grenadiers!" Which, of course, 
means the English Grenadiers, inasmuch as 
there never were any Scottish Grenadiers. 
To-day, however, the English do not sing 
this song. Their grandfathers delighted in 
it, and the tune still survives as a soldier- 
man's march. But when the modern Eng- 
lish wish to celebrate the English soldier 
vocally, they do it in their own decadent, 
bathotic way. They have an idiot-song 
called Tommy Atkins. The chorus of it goes 
somewhat in this wise : 

Oh! Tommy, Tommy Atkins, 

You're a good 'un, heart and hand; 

You're a credit to your nation 
And to your native land. 

59 



60 The Egregious English 

May your hand be ever ready! 

May your heart be ever true! 
God bless you, Tommy Atkins! 

Here 's your country's love to you! 

And since the outbreak of the late war, at 
any rate, the English do not speak of soldiers, 
but of Tommies; and the principal English 
poet has gone farther, and dubbed them Ab- 
sent-Minded Beggars. Since the outbreak 
of the war, too, it has been necessary to 
issue from time to time words of caution 
to the great English public. Lord Roberts 
— "Little Bobs," I suppose, I should call him, 
in the choice English fashion — has on two or 
three occasions deemed it advisable to let it 
be known that his desire was that the great 
English public should discontinue the prac- 
tice of treating Cape-bound or returned 
Tommies to alcoholic stimulants, and .sub- 
stitute therefor mineral waters or cocoa. This 
was very wise on Little Bobs's part, and 
it has no doubt saved at least two Cape- 
bound or returned Tommies from the degrada- 
tion of an almighty drunk. I mention this 
because it illustrates in an exceedingly quaint 



The Soldier 61 

way the attitude of the English towards the 
soldier. When there is war toward, the sol- 
dier is absolutely the most popular kind of 
man in England. In peace-time an English 
soldier is commonly credited with being so- 
cially vile and unpresentable. There is a 
popular conundrum which runs, "What is 
the difference between a soldier and a meer- 
schaum pipe?" and the answer, I regret to 
say, is, "One is the scum of the earth, and 
the other the scum of the sea." Tommy's 
place in the piping times of peace is just at 
the bottom of the social ladder; there he 
must stay, and drink four ale, and smoke 
cheap shag, and sit at the back of the gallery 
in places of amusement. Then war comes 
along, and the English bosom expands to the 
sound of the distant drum, and to the rumour 
of still more distant carnage. Who is it that's 
a-working this 'ere blooming war? Blest if 
it ain't our old friend Tommy Atkins ! Fetch 
him out of the four-ale bar at once. The 
nation's heroes have no business in four-ale 
bars. The saloon bar is the place for them, 



62 The Egregious English 

and the barmaid shall smile upon them, and 
they shall have free drinks and free cigars till 
all's blue; for they are the nation's heroes, 
and they deserve well of their country. Fur- 
thermore, if they wish to visit those great 
and glorious centres of enlightened entertain- 
ment commonly called the Halls, they shall 
no longer be stuffed obscurely away in the 
rear portion of the gallery, but they shall 
come out into the light of things ; they shall 
come blushingly and amid acclaim into the 
pit or the stalls, or, for that matter, into any 
part of the 'ouse. 

Throughout the war this has been so. It 
was so till yesterday. But the ancient Eng- 
lish smugness has begun to assert itself once 
more; and Tommy — dear Tommy, God- 
bless-you Tommy, in fact — finds staring him 
in the face, as of yore, " Soldiers in uniform 
not served in this compartment" ; "Soldiers 
in uniform cannot be admitted to any part 
of this theatre except the gallery." The 
English Kipling hit the whole matter off in 
his vulgar way when he wrote Tommy: 



The Soldier 63 

I went into a theatre as sober as could be; 

They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'ad n't none for 

me; 
They sent me to a gallery, or round the music-'alls; 
But when it comes to fightin' — Lord! they'll shove me 

in the stalls! 

For it ' s Tommy this and Tommy that , an' ' ' Tommy , 
wait outside"; 

But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the 
trooper 's on the tide — 

The troopship's on the tide, my boys — the troop- 
ship's on the tide: 

Oh! it's "Special train for Atkins" when the 
trooper 's on the tide. 

We were told that this war, if it were 
doing England no other good, was at least 
bringing her to a right understanding of the 
soldier-man. It was teaching her to take 
him by the hand, to recognise in him a cred- 
itable son and an essential factor in the State. 
It has ended in the way in which pretty well 
every English revival does end — namely, in 
smoke. Though England has as much need 
of the soldier and is as much dependent upon 
him for peace and security as any other 
nation, she has never been able — excepting, 
as I have said, in time of war — to bring her 
greedy mind to the pass of doing him the 



64 The Egregious English 

smallest honour or of rendering to him that 
measure of social credit which is obviously 
his by right. 

That the English Tommy is not altogether 
a delectable person, however, goes, I think, 
without saying. According to General Bul- 
ler and other more or less competent author- 
ities, the men in South Africa were splendid. 
I do not doubt it in the least. On the other 
hand, the "returns" from that country have 
not struck one as reaching a high standard 
of savouriness or manliness; and, however 
splendid he may have been as a campaigner, 
as an ex-campaigner the English Tommy has 
scarcely shone ; so that in a sense the changed 
attitude of the English public mind towards 
him is not to be wondered at. 

Elsewhere in this essay I have pointed out 
that the late war has not reflected any too 
much credit upon that chiefest of snobs — 
the English military officer. To go into the 
army has long been considered good form 
among the English Barbarians, and to be an 
officer in a swagger regiment may be reckoned 



The Soldier 65 

one of the best passports to English society. 
It gives a man a tone, and puts him on a 
footing with the highest, because an officer is 
a gentleman in a very special sense. But it is 
well known that, during the past half -cen- 
tury or so, the English Barbarians have been 
too prone to put their sons into the army for 
social considerations only, and without re- 
gard to their qualification or call for the pro- 
fession of arms. And in the long result it 
has come to pass that the English army is 
officered by men who know as little as pos- 
sible and care a great deal less about their 
profession, and are compelled to leave the 
instruction, and as often as not the leader- 
ship, of their men to non-commissioned 
officers. Over and over again in the South 
African campaign it was the commissioned 
officer who blundered and brought about 
disaster, and the non-commissioned officers 
and the horse sense of the rank and file that 
saved whatever of the situation there might 
be left to save. Probably the true history 
of the British reverses, major and minor, in 



66 The Egregious English 

South Africa will never be made public. But 
I believe it can be shown that in almost 
every instance it was the incapacity or re- 
missness of the English commissioned officer 
which lay at the root of the trouble. The 
fact is, that the monocled mountebank who 
is in the army, don't you know, seldom or 
never understands his job. He is too busy 
messing, and dancing, and flirting, and philan- 
dering, and racing, and gambling, and speed- 
ing the time merrily, ever to learn it. That 
the honour of Britain, and the lives of Eng- 
lishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, should be 
in his listless, damp hand for even as long as 
five minutes is an intolerable scandal. That 
he should haw and haw, and yaw and yaw, 
on the barrack-square, and take a salary out 
of the public purse for doing it, shows exactly 
how persistently stupid the English can be. 
Of course, the common reply to any attack 
upon these shallow-pated incompetents is 
that you must have gentlemen for the King's 
commissions, and that the pay the King's 
commissions carry is so inadequate that no 



The Soldier 67 

gentleman unpossessed of private means can 
afford to take one. This is a very pretty- 
argument and exceedingly English. The 
money will not run to capable men; there- 
fore let us fling it away on fools. Army re- 
form, sweeping changes at the War Office, 
new army regulations, an army on a busi- 
ness footing, and so on and so forth, are 
always being clamoured for by the English 
people, and always being promised by the 
English Government. But until the day 
when the granting of commissions and pro- 
motion are as little dependent upon social 
influence and the influence of money as ad- 
vancement in the law or advancement in the 
arts, the English army will remain just where 
it is and just as rotten as it is. 

For downright childishness the modern 
English soldier, whether he be officer or file- 
man, has perhaps no compeer. When the 
South African War broke out, Tommy and 
his officers were men of scarlet and pipe-clay 
and gold lace and magnificent head-dresses. 
Also all drill was in close order ; you were to 



68 The Egregious English 

shove in your infantry first, supported by 
your artillery, and deliver your last brilliant 
stroke with your cavalry. The men should 
go into the fray with bands playing, flags 
flying, and dressed as for parade. You com- 
menced operations with move No. i ; the 
enemy would assuredly reply with move No. 
2 ; you would then rush in with move No. 3 ; 
there would be a famous victory, and the 
streets of London would be illuminated at 
great expense. In South Africa matters did 
not quite pan out that way; the enemy de- 
clined absolutely to play the stereotyped 
war-game, for the very simple reason that 
they did not know it, and that South Africa 
is not quite of the contour of a chess-board. 
And so the English had to change their cher- 
ished system, and to learn to ride, and to 
throw their pretty uniforms into the old- 
clothes baskets, and to get out of their old 
drill into a drill which was no drill at all, and 
to give up resting their last hope on the 
British square, and to get accustomed to 
deadly conflict with an enemy whom they 



The Soldier 69 

never saw and who never took the trouble to 
inform them whether they had beaten him 
or not. It was all very trying and all very 
bewildering, and it is to the credit of the 
English army that in the course of a year or 
two it did actually manage to understand 
the precise nature of the work cut out for it 
and made some show of dealing with it in a 
workman-like way. 

Here was a lesson for us, and we learned it. 
An Englishman, you know, can learn any- 
thing when he makes up his mind to it. And 
he has learned this South African lesson 
thoroughly well ; so well, indeed, that it looks 
like being the only lesson he will be able to 
repeat any time in the next half-century. 
For what has he done? Well, to judge by 
appearances, we must reason this way: "I 
was not prepared for this South African 
business. It was a new thing to me. It 
gave me a new notion of the whole art and 
practice of war. The old authorities were 
clean out of it. Therefore I solemnly abjure 
the old authorities. For the future I wear 



70 The Egregious English 

slouch-hats and khaki and puttees and a 
jacket full of pockets, and I drill for the 
express notion that I may some day meet a 
Boer farmer. The entire sartorial and gen- 
eral aspect of my army shall be remodelled 
on lines which might induce one to think 
that the sole enemy of mankind was Mr. 
Kruger, and the great military centre of the 
world was Pretoria." It does not seem to 
occur to the poor body that his next great 
trial is not in the least likely to overtake 
him in South Africa. He has had to fight 
on the Continent of Europe before to-day, 
and I shall not be surprised if he has to do 
it again before many years have passed over 
his head. Yet, wherever his next large fight- 
ing has to be done, you will find that he will 
sail into it in his good old infantile, stupid 
English way, armed cap-a-pie for the special 
destruction of Boers. It is just gross want of 
sense, and that is all that can be said for it. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE NAVY 

Since Trafalgar, the English navy has 
been the apple of the Englishman's eye. He 
holds that the English power is a sea-power ; 
that these leviathans afloat, the King's ships, 
are his first line of defence ; and that so long 
as he keeps the English navy up to the mark 
he can defy the world. His method of keep- 
ing it up to the mark is most singular. It 
consists of tinkering with old ships genera- 
tion after generation, laying down new ones 
which seemingly never get finished, and of 
being chronically short of men. The naval 
critics of England may be divided sharply 
into two camps. In the one we have a 
number of gentlemen who are naval critics 
simply because they happen to be connected 
71 



72 The Egregious English 

with newspapers. These young persons 
are naturally anxious to do the best that 
can be done for their papers and for them- 
selves. They recognise that if they are to 
be in a position to obtain immediate and 
first-hand information — not to say exclusive 
information — as to naval doings, they must 
stand well with the Admiralty and the au- 
thorities. The Admiralty and the authori- 
ties are not in need of adverse critics. What 
they like and what they will have are smily, 
wily reporters, who will swear with the offi- 
cial word, see with the official eye, and take 
the rest for granted. In the other camp of 
naval critics you have a bright collection of 
book-compilers, naval architects, and patent- 
mongers, all of whom have some sort of fad 
to exploit or some private axe to grind. 
Hence the amiable English taxpayer knows 
just as much at the present moment about 
his navy as he knew three years ago about 
his army. In spite of the perfervid assur- 
ances of Mr. Kipling, and of the ill- written, 
anti-scare manifestoes of the morning papers, 



The Navy 73 

the English taxpayer knows in his heart that 
all is not so well as it might be with the Eng- 
lish navy. What is wrong the English tax- 
payer cannot tell you; but there it is, and 
he has a sort of feeling that, when the big 
sea-tussle comes, the English navy, being 
tried, will be found wanting. Herein I think 
he shows great prescience. The superstition 
to the effect that the English rule the waves 
has of late begun to be known for what it is. 
There are nowadays other Richmonds in the 
field, all bent on doing a little wave-ruling 
on their own account. And after the first 
start of surprise and astonishment, the sleepy, 
slack, undiscerning Englishman has just let 
things go on as they were, and has just dilly- 
dallied what time the new wave-rulers were 
building and equipping the finest battle-ships 
that modern science can put afloat, and mak- 
ing arrangements for the acquisition of as 
much naval supremacy as they can lay their 
hands on. And whether the English navy 
be or be not as efficient as the Admiralty and 
the admirals would have us believe, it is 



74 The Egregious English 

quite certain that, in consequence of bud- 
ding wave-rulers, the English navy is not, on 
the whole, so formidable a weapon or so im- 
pregnable a defence as it ought to be. The 
fact is, that in the matter of naval strength, 
offensive and defensive, the English are just 
a quarter of a century behind. They slept 
whilst their good friends the French, the 
Russians, and the Germans were climbing 
upward in the dark ; and when they woke it 
was to perceive that another navy had sprung 
into existence by the side of the English 
navy, and that the task of catching up, of 
putting the old navy into a position of ab- 
solute supremacy over the new, was well- 
nigh an impossible one. You cannot build 
line-of-battle ships in an hour. Further- 
more, the yards of England, though capable 
of extraordinary achievements, are not ca- 
pable of a greater output than the yards 
of France, Russia, and Germany conjoined. 
Half a century ago the English had a dis- 
tinct and preponderating start. When the 
other powers began to show increased activ- 



The Navy 75 

ity in the matter of shipbuilding, the Eng- 
lish said, "It is of no consequence; let 'em 
build." They threw their start clean away. 
The probabilities are that they will never be 
able to regain it. 

Quite apart from the large general ques- 
tion, however, and granting that on paper 
England's sea-power is equal to that of any 
three powers combined, it cannot have 
escaped the attention of the interested that 
the foreign naval experts view our whole 
flotilla with a singular calm, and appear to 
be quite amused when we talk of naval 
efficiency and advancement. It is pretty 
certain that this calm and this amusement 
are not based entirely in either ignorance or 
arrogance. Ships built and fitted in Contin- 
ental yards may lack the advantage of being 
English built, but they are fighting -ships 
nevertheless, and they have not much to 
lose by comparison with the best English 
fighting-ships, even when the comparison is 
made by English experts. Indeed, it is very 
much open to question whether some of the 



76 The Egregious English 

Continental ships are not a long way ahead 
of some of the best English ships in destruc- 
tive power and possibilities for fight. Of 
course the common reply to this is, that it is 
no good having a fine machine unless you 
have the right man to handle it. And Jack, 
of course, — the honest English Jack, — is the 
only man in the world that really knows how 
to handle fighting-ships. Well, it may be so, 
or it may not be so. The Englishman will 
undoubtedly keep his engines going and 
stick to his guns till chaos engulfs him. It 
seems possible, too, that he has made him- 
self thoroughly familiar with every detail of 
the machine he has got to work, and that he 
knows his business in a way which leaves 
precious little room for more intimate know- 
ledge. In spite of all this, however, it 
cannot be denied that the Continental navy- 
man is slowly but surely creeping up to the 
English standard. That as a rule he is a 
man of better family than the English navy- 
man, that his conditions of service are more 
favourable, and that his food and accommo- 



The Navy 77 

dation are better, are all in his favour. He 
may lack the steadiness and the grit of the 
old original English hearts of oak. Still, he 
is coming on and making progress ; whereas 
the old original English hearts of oak do not 
appear to be getting much "forrader." Be- 
sides, it is well known that the English do 
not possess anything like enough of them, and 
those whom they do possess have such a love 
for the service that they take particularly 
good care to warn would-be recruits off it. 

From time immemorial the English have 
made a point of treating the saviours of their 
country meanly and shabbily. In the Crimea 
the English troops were half-starved and 
went about in rags, while a lot of broad- 
shouldered, genial Englishmen made fortunes 
out of army contracts. It was the same in 
the Transvaal, and it will be the same when- 
ever England is at war. In peace-time she 
does manage to keep her soldiers and sailors 
decently dressed, but it is notorious that she 
nips them in the paunch, and that the roast 
beef and plum-pudding and flagons of Octo- 



78 The Egregious English 

ber which are supposed to be the meat and 
drink of John Bull are not considered good 
for his brave defenders. A beef -fed army 
and a beef -fed navy are what Englishmen 
believe they get for their money. The rank 
and file of the army and navy are better in- 
formed. With a navy that is undersized, 
undermanned, underfed, and underpaid, the 
English chances of triumph, when her real 
strength is put to the test, are problemati- 
cal. Meanwhile, we may comfort ourselves 
with Mr. Kipling and the Daily Telegraph. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CHURCHES 

The English have one sauce. But the 
number of their religions is as the sands of 
the sea. Roughly speaking, they divide 
themselves religiously into two classes — An- 
glicans and Nonconformists. The Anglicans, 
one may say, are reformed Catholics; the 
Nonconformists, reformed Anglicans. Appar- 
ently all English religions — with the excep- 
tion, of course, of the Catholic religion, which 
is not counted — date from or since the Re- 
formation. We know what the Reformation 
means in Scotland, though the English no- 
tion of it seems to be a trifle vague. We also 
know in Scotland what religion means. I 
doubt if the English have any such know- 
ledge. One has only to visit an average 

79 



80 The Egregious English 

Anglican or Nonconformist church on the 
Sabbath to perceive that in England religion 
is under a cloud and has almost ceased to be 
a spiritual matter. In the first place, you 
will notice that the congregation is for the 
most part composed of women and children. 
Englishmen are too busy or too bored to go 
to church on the Sabbath. What little faith, 
what little religious fervour or feeling, they 
ever possessed has been knocked out of them, 
and they no longer go to church. And this 
change has been accomplished, not by the 
failure of dogmas, not by the spread of free- 
thought, not by secularists, anti-clericalists, 
or philosophers, but simply by an indolent 
clergy on the one hand and cheap railway 
fares on the other. The mediocre preacher 
and the new-fangled English week-end have 
emptied the churches of England's manhood. 
The women and children are left, a puling, 
bemused crowd, and to these the English 
shepherds and pastors blate • heir cheap ritual 
and read their ill-considered sermons. 

It is curious to note how easily an English 



The Churches 81 

parson or Nonconformist minister can make 
a reputation for greatness as a preacher. Let 
him be just a little more competent than the 
average, and people flock to hear him. I 
doubt if there is a really great preacher alive 
in England to-day. Yet there are three or 
four who pass for great, and who are sup- 
posed to be in line with St. Paul, John Knox, 
and Wesley. To give instances would be in- 
vidious, but I have no hesitation in asserting 
that the preachments offered in London at 
the three or four great churches which are 
supposed to enshrine orators are, as a rule, 
exceedingly feeble efforts, tricked out with 
gauds and mannerisms, packed with trite 
sentiment, and utterly devoid of doctrine, 
inspiration, and value. There are not three 
bishops on the English bench that can fur- 
nish forth a sermon worth going fifty yards 
to hear. There is not a Nonconformist min- 
ister who has a soul above stodginess, con- 
vention, and a convenient if threadbare 
Scriptural tag. The Salvation Army, per- 
haps, have the fervour and the courage, but 

6 



82 The Egregious English 

they lack wisdom, and they have no art. 
The Congregationalists have some of the 
wisdom and a touch of the art, but they have 
no fervour. Indeed, wherever you turn you 
find that the recognised English religionists 
have given themselves up to a decadent, 
Hebraic emotion, and let the solid things of 
the spirit — the Hebraic culture, the Hebraic 
vision, the Hebraic passion — pass by them. 
Gradually the churches of this remarkable 
country are ceasing to have anything to do 
with religion at all. " Religion be hanged!" 
say those that run them. " Religion no 
longer appeals to the wayward, stony- 
hearted, over-driven, half -educated English 
populace. What is wanted is social bright- 
ness and warmth, the religion of brotherhood 
and the full belly ; so that we will give magic- 
lantern entertainments in our churches on 
the Lord's Day, we will go in 'bald-headed' 
for pleasant Sunday afternoons, hot coffee 
and veal-and-ham pies, and screws of tobacco 
given away at the doors, wrapped up in a 
tract, which you are at liberty either to read 



The Churches 83 

or to light your pipe with." As for the 
English priests that had the authority of 
God, they are no longer sure whether they 
have that authority or not. Of course, they 
believe they have it in a sacerdotal, canonical, 
and private way ; but not one of them dare 
stand up and swear by his powers publicly. 
The bishops are all for peace and quietness. 
" If you please, we are your friends, and not 
your masters," say they to their clergy; and 
their clergy, to use an English vulgarism, 
"wink the other eye." And the clergy, too, 
in turn are the friends and not the masters 
of common men; they are so much your 
friends, indeed, that, providing you mount a 
silk hat on Sunday and put a penny on the 
plate, you can depend upon a friendly shake 
of the hand and a kindly grin of recognition 
six days in the week, even though you hap- 
pen to be a bookmaker or the keeper of a 
bucket-shop. For the Nonconformist clergy, 
if clergy they may be called, they speak 
humorously at tea-parties, they enter into 
hat -trimming competitions at bazaars, and 



84 The Egregious English 

they play principal guest at the tables of 
over-fed tradesmen. There is not a man 
amongst them who can say bo to a goose. 
There is not a man amongst them who as a 
social unit is worth the £150 a year and a 
manse, with £10 per annum for each child, 
that a glozing, unintellectual English con- 
gregation hands over to him. Out of the 
ease and security and respectability and dolce 
far niente which the Church of England pro- 
vides for a considerable proportion of her 
priests, she has managed to evolve a few 
scholars, a few men of letters, perhaps an odd 
saint or two, and an odd man of tempera- 
ment and mark. But what have the Eng- 
lish Nonconformists produced? Dr. Horton 
and Dr. Parker, and that G. R. Sims of re- 
ligionists, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes. To 
this distinguished triumvirate — though the 
English Nonconformists will hold up pious 
hands of horror at the notion — one may add 
that valiant thumper of the pulpit drum, 
General Booth, w T ho is doing a work in re- 
ligious decadence and bathoticism which it 



The Churches 85 

will take centuries to undo. Want of heart 
and want of mind, coupled with the blessed 
spirit of tolerance, have indeed played havoc 
with the English Churches. 

The loosening of the grip of the Church 
on English society has, of course, not been 
without its results on English morals and on 
English society at large. There is a general 
feeling abroad that religion is played out, 
that the system of Hebrew ethics which has 
been drilled into the English blood by genera- 
tions of the faithful was all very well for the 
faithful, but is altogether impracticable and 
out of harmony with the present intelligent 
times. You will find Englishmen now- 
adays complaining that the taint of spiritu- 
alism, ascetism, and ethical faith which they 
have inherited from their people is a source 
of hindrance to them in the matter of their 
commercial or social progress, and their lives 
are spent in an endeavour to eradicate or to 
triumph over that taint. The Archbishop of 
Canterbury could not run a tea-shop by the 
rules laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, 



86 The Egregious English 

they will tell you; and, what is worse, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with them. 
11 Take all thou hast, and give it to the poor" 
is out of the question even for Dr. Horton. 
Since those blessed words were said, we are 
told, the Poor Law has sprung up ; we give 
all that is necessary for pauperism in the 
poor-rate; and, thanks to the excellence of 
our social system, it is now impossible for 
man, woman, or child to die of starvation, 
provided only that they will work. I have 
heard it stated by an English Nonconformist 
minister that his chief complaint against the 
Roman Catholic community in his district 
was their habit of being over-liberal to the 
poor. "No man is refused," observed my 
Nonconformist friend, "no matter how dis- 
solute or idle or irreligious he may be." 

Then in the large question of the employ- 
ment of human flesh and blood to make 
money for you, the modern Englishman finds 
that he must either tear the effects of his 
religious bringing-up out of his heart, or 
forego the possibility of becoming really rich, 



The Churches Sy 

don't you know. It is all a matter of supply 
and demand; and if the mass of humanity 
live starved lives and die daily in order that 
I may be fat and warm and cultured and 
possessed of surpluses at banks, it is not my 
fault. You must really blame supply and 
demand. With this fine phrase on his lips, 
the English capitalist confutes all the philo- 
sophies and sets his foot on the majority of 
the decencies of life. Of course, I shall be told 
that the prince and chief of all hide-bound 
industrial capitalists is Mr. Andrew Carnegie, 
who happens to be a Scot. And I cheerfully 
admit that Mr. Carnegie is a very serious 
case in point. But for our one Mr. Carnegie, 
the English have fifty Mr. Carnegies. They 
may not be so rich or so famous; but there 
they are, and the blood and spirit of the Eng- 
lish people suffer accordingly. The religion 
of the wealthy does not prevent them from 
grinding the face of the poor ; and the relig- 
ion of the middle classes is of pretty much 
the same order. It is at the hands of the 
English middle classes that the English poor 



SS The Egregious English 

suffer a further and a bitterer depredation. 
For when you have earned money hardly, 
you want good goods for it ; and the English 
middle classes, who are nearly all shop- 
keepers, either directly or indirectly, make a 
point of palming off on you the very worst 
goods the law will allow them to sell. 

And, in spite of all, the churches continue 
to open their doors, new churches continue 
to be built, million-pound funds are raised, 
the missionary speeds over the blue wave 
to the succour of the 'eathen, and English 
women and children have their pleasant Sun- 
day afternoons, and bishops keep high-step- 
ping horses ; Church and State are grappled 
together with hooks of steel, and England is 
a Christian country. Till the churches get 
out of their slippers and their sloth and their 
tea-bibbing and their tolerance, matters will 
go on in the same old futile, scandalous way. 
If they are to have charge and direction of 
the soul of man, they must remember that 
the soul of man is a greater thing than ease, 
and a greater thing than the Church; they 



The Churches 89 

must not play with the immortal part of 
humanity, and they must not trifle with the 
things which they believe to be of God. In 
no other country save England would such 
churches and such priests as the English 
now possess be tolerated or supported; it 
is the English decadence which has rendered 
Englishmen blind to the stupidity and ban- 
ality of their pastors and spiritual guides, 
and it is the English easy-heartedness which 
permits the game of cant and cadge and 
sham to go on unchecked. 



CHAPTER X 

THE POLITICIAN 

The flower and exemplar of well-nigh 
everything that is choicely and brutally Eng- 
lish may be summed up in the English poli- 
tician. Such a tub-thumper, such a master 
of claptrap and the arts and feints and 
fetches of oratory, has never been known 
before since the world began. He is Eng- 
lish, and therefore he knows his business. 
He has made a study of it as a business, and 
without regard to its more serious issues. 
His position is, that, if he would do himself 
well, he must tie himself hand and foot to 
some party, and serve that party through 
thick and thin. Then in the end, and with 
good luck, will come reward. You may be 
born in a chandler's shop. By birth, there- 
90 



The Politician 91 

fore, you belong to the very lower English 
middle class. Through the practice of a 
number of commercial virtues, and with the 
help of considerable speculation outside your 
own business, you become wealthy. Now, 
wealth without honour is nothing to an Eng- 
lishman. He cannot brook that his wealth, 
his shining, glorious superfluity, should be 
hidden under a bushel. Therefore he seeks 
municipal honours; he becomes a town 
councillor, an alderman, a mayor even. 

But these, after all, are not the summits; 
they lead at best only to a common knight- 
hood, and any fool can get knighted if he 
wants to. So you determine to seek Parlia- 
mentary honours. You subscribe liberally 
to the funds of your party, and by-and- 
by a constituency is found for you to 
contest. You lose the fight and subscribe 
again; another constituency is found for 
you, and you win by the skin of your teeth 
or with a plumping majority, as the case 
may be. You are now a full-blown member 
of Parliament; it is worth the money and 



9 2 The Egregious English 

much better than being a mayor. Up to 
this time you have been an orator of sorts. 
You have held forth from schoolroom plat- 
forms and the, tops of waggons what time 
the assembled populace shouted and threw 
up its sweaty nightcaps. You have been 
carried shoulder high behind brass bands ren- 
dering See, the Conquering Hero Comes. Now 
however, you are really in Parliament; and 
for the nonce — for several years, in fact — you 
must give up talking. There is plenty for 
you to do; you may put questions on the 
paper, you may get a look in at committee 
work, you may show electors round the 
Houses, and you may go on subscribing lib- 
erally to the party funds. When you have 
subscribed enough, it is just within the 
bounds of possibility that the heads of the 
party — the Front Bench people, as it were — 
will begin to discover that there is virtue in 
you. You will be encouraged to make a 
speech or two at the slackest part of debates, 
and some fine day you may be entrusted 
with the fortunes of a little Bill which your 



The Politician 93 

party wishes to rush through. All the while 
you are subscribing liberally to the party 
funds. After many years, when you are 
least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall 
out of the universe — that is to say, there is 
a General Election. You have to fight your 
seat; you win; you come nobly back; be- 
hold, your party is in power. Then comes 
the grand moment of your life. You are 
shovelled into the Cabinet on account of 
services rendered. From this point, if you 
possess any ability at all, you can have 
things pretty much your own way; and if 
your ambition has been to hear yourself 
called "My lord" before you die, and to see 
your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great oc- 
casions, and your sons swanking about town 
with "Hon." before their names, you can 
manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves 
many years of hard work and lavish expend- 
iture ; but it is politically possible in Eng- 
land for a man to be born on the flags and to 
die properly set forth in Burke and Debrett. 
I do not say for a moment that the end 



94 The Egregious English 

and aim of every English politician is the 
peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his 
labours are directed towards some end of 
honour or emolument, and seldom or never 
to the good of the State. It is ambition, and 
not patriotism, that fires his bosom; it is 
self -aggrandisement, and not a desire for the 
welfare of the English people, that keeps him 
going; and it is party, and not principle, 
that guides and rules his legislative actions. 
Of course, the great art of being a politician 
is to hide these facts from the public. If 
you went down to your constituency like an 
honest man and said, " Gentlemen, I wish 
you to return me to Parliament in order that 
I may make a high position for myself, in 
order that I may become a man of rank and 
the founder of a family," your constituency 
would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you 
go down with an altogether different tale: 
" I am going to the House of Commons, gen- 
tlemen, in your interests and not in mine. 
It will cost me large sums of money ; besides 
which, as your member, I shall be expected 



The Politician 95 

to subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. 
But I have the best interests of Muckington 
at heart; and, if you honour me by mak- 
ing me your representative, money is no 
object." 

It is a wonderful business, and a great and 
a glorious. One stands in astonishment be- 
fore the bright English intelligence which 
takes so much on promise and gets so little 
performed. An English party never goes 
into power with the intention of doing more 
than half of what it has promised to do. At 
election times its great business is to capture 
votes : these must be had at any price short 
of rank bribery. And, once landed with the 
blest, the party immediately settles down, 
not to the work of carrying out its promises, 
but to the far more serious business of keep- 
ing itself in power. From the point of view 
of the careless lay-observer, the House of 
Commons is an assemblage for the discussion 
of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being 
managed in the best possible way. To the 
politician it is just an arena in which two 



96 The Egregious English 

sets of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, 
ridicule, and bring about the downfall of 
each other. 

The amount of interest the Englishman is 
supposed to take in this amazing assemblage 
and its doings makes it plain that the Eng- 
lishman himself is well-nigh as foolish and 
well-nigh as oblique as the person whom he 
elects to represent him. Next to royalty 
itself there is nobody in England who can 
command so much attention and such a 
prominent place in the picture as the poli- 
tician. If he be a Cabinet Minister of any 
standing, it is impossible for him to walk 
through the streets either of London or of 
any of the English provincial towns without 
being immediately recognised and "respect- 
fully saluted"; whereas, if he happens to 
have come to any metropolitan district or 
provincial town on political business bent, 
he may depend upon being received at the 
proper point by the local authorities, sup- 
ported by a guard of honour of the local 
Volunteers, and he may also depend upon 



The Politician 97 

more or less of an ovation on his way to and 
from the place of meeting. 

Year in and year out, too, the illustrated 
papers of every degree blossom with his latest 
photograph. Mr. So-and-so in his new motor- 
car ; Mr. So-and-so playing golf ; Mr. So-and-so 
and the King ; Mr. So-and-so addressing the 
mob from the railway train, — these are pic- 
tures in which every Englishman has delighted 
from his youth up, and in which he will always 
find great artistic and moral satisfaction. As 
for the journals which live out of the personal 
paragraph, they must give — or imagine they 
must give — pride of place to the politician, or 
perish. Little anecdotes of the sayings and 
doings of the politically great are always mar- 
ketable. It is not necessary that they should 
have the slightest foundation in truth; but 
they must be neat, reasonably amusing, and 
nattering to the personage involved. 

It is when one turns to the English daily 
papers, however, that one begins to under- 
stand what an extraordinary hold the polit- 
ical interest has upon the English public 



98 The Egregious English 

mind. It is well known that, in the main, 
the debates in the House of Commons are 
quite dull, colourless, and somnolent func- 
tions. Half of them take place in the pre- 
sence only of the Speaker and a quorum. 
That is to say, nine nights out of ten, mem- 
bers spend the greater portion of their time 
in the smoke-rooms, dining-rooms, and lob- 
bies, and not in the House itself, the simple 
reason being that, as a rule, the debates are 
not interesting. When some reputable cham- 
pion of either party gets on his legs, or when 
some wag is up, members manage to attend 
in force; but it is only at these moments 
that they do so. Yet, if you pick up an 
English morning newspaper, you will find 
six columns of that sheet devoted to a report 
of the proceedings in Parliament; another 
three columns of descriptive matter bearing 
on the same proceedings; and, out of four 
or five leaders, three at least deal with the 
political question of the moment. Even 
when Parliament is not sitting, the first 
leader is never by any chance other than 



The Politician 99 

political. From the point of view of the 
dull English mind, nothing more important 
than a political happening can happen in 
this world. Mr. Somebody has called Mr. 
Somebody else a liar across the floor of the 
House of Commons. It is essential for 
the well-being of the country at large that the 
episode should be reported with a separate 
subhead and great circumstance in the Par- 
liamentary report ; that the scene should be 
described by the lively and picturesque pen 
of the writer of the Parliamentary sketch; 
that the appearance of the gentleman who 
called the other gentleman a liar should be 
dwelt upon in the notes; that instances of 
other gentlemen having called gentlemen 
liars across the floor of the House should also 
be given in the notes; and, finally, that a 
rotund and windy leader should be written, 
wherein is discussed gravely the general ad- 
visability of gentlemen calling other gentle- 
men liars across the floor of the House; 
wherein one is assured that, in spite of occa- 
sional regrettable instances of the kind, the 

LofC. 



ioo The Egregious English 

English Parliament is the most decorous and 
dignified assemblage under the sun; and 
wherein we cannot refrain from paying our 
tribute of respectful admiration to the Right 
Honourable the Speaker, whose tact, good 
sense, and gentleman-like spirit, coupled with 
the firmness, resolution, and knowledge of 
the procedure of the House becoming to his 
high position, invariably enable him to still 
the storm and to repress the angry passions 
of our heated legislators before any great 
harm has been done. So that a gentleman 
who calls another gentleman a liar across the 
floor of the House of Commons really ren- 
ders a great service to Englishmen, inasmuch 
as he provides them with a gratuitous enter- 
tainment, about which they may read, talk, 
and argue for at least twenty-four hours. 

Recognising their own love of politics and 
political strife, and knowing in their hearts 
that the talk in the House of Commons — not 
to mention the House of Lords — is, gener- 
ally speaking, of the flattest and flabbiest, 
one would imagine that the wise English 



The Politician 101 

would be at some pains to take measures 
calculated to brighten up the Parliamentary 
debates and render them of real interest. 
But no such precautions are taken. When 
a would-be member of Parliament is heckled, 
he is never by any chance asked if he is pre- 
pared, at the psychological moment, to pull 
the nose of one of the right honourable gentle- 
men opposite. Any member of Parliament 
who, in the middle of a dull debate, would 
walk across the floor and box the ears of, 
say, Mr. Balfour, or Lord Hugh Cecil, would 
thereby earn for himself the distinction of 
being the best-discussed and best-described 
man in England for quite half a week. Con- 
sidering the small amount of exertion re- 
quired for such a proceeding, and the very 
large amount of notoriety which would accrue 
to the person who ventured on it, one won- 
ders that it has never been done. 

In spite of the abnormal share of pub- 
licity and applause which is extended to the 
English politician, however, the solemn fact 
remains that he is seldom a person of any 



102 The Egregious English 

real force, capacity, understanding, or char- 
acter. Commonplace, mediocre, insincere, 
inept, are the epithets which best describe 
him. He passes through the legislative 
chamber or chambers, says his say in undis- 
tinguished speeches, casts his vote, earns his 
place, his pension, or his peerage, and passes 
beyond our echo and our hail. The daily 
papers manufacture for him an obituary 
notice varying in length from five lines to a 
couple of columns, and nobody wants to hear 
anything more about him. As a matter of 
fact, he has left the world neither wiser nor 
wittier nor happier than he found it. If he 
has made one phrase or uttered one senti- 
ment that sticks in men's minds, he is for- 
tunate. Neither history nor posterity will 
have anything to say about him, though in 
his day he kicked up some fuss and took up 
a lot of room. In short, politics as a career 
in England is not a career for solid, serious 
men. It merely serves the turn of the spe- 
cious, the shallow, the incompetent, and the 
vainglorious. 



CHAPTER XI 

POETS 

It may be set down as an axiom that a 
nation which is in the proper enjoyment of 
all its faculties, which is healthy, wealthy, 
wise, and properly conditioned, must be pro- 
ducing a certain amount of poetry. From 
the beginning this has been so ; it will be so 
to the end. When England was at her high- 
est, when the best in her was having full 
play, she produced poets. Right down into 
the Victorian Era she went on producing 
them. Then she took to the Stock Exchange 
and an ostentatious way of life, and the sup- 
ply of poets fell off. If we except Mr. Swin- 
burne, who does not belong rightfully to this 
present time, there is not a poet of any parts 
exercising his function in England to-day. 
103 



104 The Egregious English 

Furthermore, any bookseller will tell you 
that the demand for poetry-books by new 
writers has practically ceased to exist. 

These statements will be called sweeping 
by a certain school of critics, and I shall be 
asked to cast my eye round the English nest 
of singing-birds, and to answer and say 
whether Mr. So-and-so be not a poet, and 
Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. 
So-and-so. I shall also be asked to say if I 
am prepared to deny that of Mr. So-and-so's 
last volume of verse three hundred copies 
were actually sold to the booksellers. For 
the propounders of such questions I have one 
answer — namely, it may be so. 

In the meantime let us do our best to find 
an English poet who is worth the name, and 
who is prescriptively entitled to be men- 
tioned in the category which begins with 
Chaucer and ends with Mr. Swinburne. Shall 
we try Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Tested by 
sales and the amount of dust he has man- 
aged to kick up, Mr. Kipling should be a 
poet of parts. He is still young, and, hap- 



Poets 105 

pily, among the living; but it cannot be 
denied that as a poet he has already out- 
lived his reputation. Two years ago he 
could set the English-speaking nations hum- 
ming or reciting whatever he chose to put 
into metre. Some of his little things looked 
like lasting. Already the majority of them 
are forgotten. To the next generation, if he 
be known at all, he will be known as the 
author of three pieces — Recessional, the 
U Envoi appended to Life's Handicap, and 
Mandalay. What is to become of such 
verses as the following? 

'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor, 
With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead? 

She 'as ships on the foam — she 'as millions at 'ome, 
An' she pays us poor beggars in red. 
('Ow poor beggars in red!) 

There's 'er nick on the cavalry 'orses, 
There's 'er mark on the medical stores — 

An' 'er troopers you'll find with a fair wind be'ind 
That takes us to various wars. 

(Poor beggars ! barbarious wars !) 

Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor, 
An' 'ere's to the stores and the guns, 

The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forces 
O' Missis Victorier's sons. 

(Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!) 



106 The Egregious English 

At the time of their appearance these lines 
and the like of them were vastly admired; 
everybody read them, most people praised 
them. They were supposed to stir the Eng- 
lish blood like a blast of martial trumpets. 
Here at length was the poet England had 
been waiting for. There could be no mis- 
take about him ; he had the authentic voice, 
the incommunicable fire, the master-touch. 
He had come to stay. At the present mo- 
ment the bulk of his metrical work is just 
about as dead and forgotten as the coster- 
songs of yesteryear. He has not even made 
a cult ; nobody quotes him, nobody believes 
in him as a poetical master, nobody wants 
to hear any more of him. His imitators have 
all gone back to the imitation of better men. 
If a copy of verses have a flavour of Kipling 
about it nowadays, editors drop it as they 
would drop a hot coal. So much for the 
poet of empire, the poet of the people, the 
metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq. 

Another poet of empire — Mr. W. E. Hen- 
ley — has fared very little better. "What 



Poets 107 

can I do for England?" is, I believe, still in 
request among the makers of a certain class 
of anthology; but English poetry in the 
bulk is just the same as if Mr. Henley had 
never been. Even the balderdash about 
"my indomitable soul" has fallen out of the 
usus loquendi of young men's Christian as- 
sociations and young men's debating so- 
cieties. The Song of the Sword is sung no 
longer; For England's Sake has gone the 
way of all truculent war-poetry; and out of 
Hawthorn and Lavender perhaps a couple of 
lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns 
when Burns had been a century dead. Who 
will consider it worth while to attack Mr. 
Henley in, say, the year 2002? 

Possibly the real, true English poet who 
will in due course put on the laurel of Mr. 
Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. 
Stephen Phillips is a purveyor of metrical 
notions for the stage, and in his last great 
work — Ulysses — I find him writing as follows : 

Athene. Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard, 
Whose act is lightning after thunder-word, 



108 The Egregious English 

A boon ! a boon ! that I compassion find 
For one, the most unhappy of mankind. 

Zeus. How is he named? 

Athene. Ulysses. He who planned 

To take the towered city of Troy-land — 
A mighty spearsman, and a seaman wise, 
A hunter, and at need a lord of lies. 
With woven wiles he stole the Trojan town 
Which ten years' battle could not batter down: 
Oft hath he made sweet sacrifice to thee. 

Zeus (nodding benevolently) . I mind me of the sav- 
oury smell. 

Athene. Yet he, 

When all the other captains had won home, 
Was whirled about the wilderness of foam: 
For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore, 
Mocked by the green of some receding shore. 
Yet over wind and wave he had his will, 
Blistered and buffeted, unbaffied still. 
Ever the snare was set, ever in vain — 
The Lotus Island and the Siren strain; 
Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run, 
Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun. 
Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed, 
So much encountered, and so little quailed? 

Which is exactly the kind of poetry one 
requires for the cavern scene of a New Year's 
pantomime. 

Possibly, again, the real, true English 
poet is Mr. William Watson, with his tire- 
some mimicry of Wordsworth and his high- 



Poets 109 

and-dry style of lyrical architecture. Mr. 
Watson is believed to have done great things, 
but his role now appears to be one of aus- 
tere silence ; he is what the old writers would 
have termed a costive poet. And if his 
Collected Poems are to be the end of him, his 
end will not be long deferred. Or, possibly, 
the one and only poet our England of to-day 
would wish to boast is Mr. Arthur Symons. 
Mr. Symons writes just the kind of poetry 
one might expect of a versifier who, in early 
youth, had loved a cigarette-smoking ballet- 
girl, and could never bring himself to re- 
press his passion. Here is a sample of Mr. 
Arthur Symons at his choicest : 

The feverish room and that white bed, 
The tumbled skirts upon a chair, 
The novel flung half open where 

Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread. 



And you, half dressed and half awake, 
Your slant eyes strangely watching me; 
And I, who watch you drowsily, 

With eyes that, having slept not, ache: 



no The Egregious English 

This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?) 

Will rise, a ghost of memory, if 

Ever again my handkerchief 
Is scented with White Heliotrope. 

No doubt, if the English continue to descend 
the moral Avernus at their present rate of 
speed, Mr. Symons will become, by sheer 
process of time, the representative poet of 
the nation. It is part of a poet's duty to 
look into the future, and Mr. Symons ap- 
pears to have taken the next two or three 
generations of Englishmen by the forelock. 
May he have the reward which is his due ! 

For the rest, they all mean well, and they 
all aim high; but one is afraid that nothing 
will come of them. There are Francis 
Thompson, and Laurence Housman, and 
Henry Newbolt, and Laurence Binyon, and 
F. B. Money-Coutts, and Arthur Christopher 
Benson, and Victor Plarr — amiable perform- 
ers all, but each a standing example of poeti- 
cal shortcoming. Perhaps one ought not to 
mention Mr. John Davidson and Mr. W. B. 
Yeats, because Mr. Davidson is a Scot, and 
Mr. Yeats, putatively, at any rate, an Irish- 



Poets 1 1 1 

man. In some respects these twain may be 
considered the pick of the basket. I am 
constrained to admit, however, that neither 
of them has as yet fulfilled his earlier promise. 
So that, on the whole, England is practi- 
ally without poets of marked or extraordin- 
ary attainments. The reason is not far to 
seek. She is losing the breed of noble 
bloods; her greed, her luxuriousness, her 
excesses, her contempt for all but the ma- 
terial, are beginning to find her out. Her 
youths, who should be fired by the brightest 
emotions, are bidden not to be fools, and 
taught that the whole duty of man is to be 
washed and combed and financially success- 
ful. Consequently that section of English 
adolescence which, in the nature of things, 
begins with poetry and gladness very speed- 
ily throws up the sponge. Consecration to 
the muse is no longer thought of among Eng- 
lishmen. They cannot be content to be 
published and take their chance. The dis- 
mal shibboleth, " Poetry does not pay," 
wears them all down. What is the good of 



ii2 The Egregious English 

writing verses which bring you neither repu- 
tation nor emolument? One must live, and 
to live like a gentleman by honest toil, and 
devote one's leisure instead of one's life to 
poetry, is the better part. Meanwhile, Eng- 
land jogs along quite comfortably. She can 
get Keats for a shilling, and Shakespeare for 
sixpence. Why should she worry herself for 
a moment with the new men? 



CHAPTER XII 

FICTION 

After much patient thinking, the Eng- 
lish have come to the conclusion that there 
is but one branch of literary art, and that 
its name is Fiction. And by fiction the 
English really mean the six-shilling novel. 
I do not think it is too much to say, that 
since the six-shilling novel was first thrust 
upon our delighted attention it has never 
brought within its covers six shillings' worth 
of reading. The high priest and the high 
priestess who serve to the right and left of 
the altar of six-shillingism are, as every one 
knows, Mr. Hall Caine and Miss Marie Cor- 
elli. Each of them wears a golden ephod, 
with a breastplate of jewels arranged to 
spell out the magic figures, One Hundred 

8 

"3 



ii4 The Egregious English 

Thousand. All the other priests of the 
Tabernacle look with awe and envy upon 
these two, because the other priests' breast- 
plates have hard work to spell out fifty 
thousand, and some of them do not even 
achieve one thousand five hundred. Burnt- 
offerings of Caine and Corelli therefore fill 
the place with savour. A pair of sorrier 
writers never was on sea or land. Every- 
body knows it, nobody denies it, and nobody 
seems sad about it. The six-shilling novel 
is an established English institution. Caine 
and Corelli are its prop and stay, and the 
rest do their best to keep in the running and 
pick up the minor money-bags. 

The perusal of six-shilling fiction is prac- 
tically a sort of mania. It has seized in its 
grip the fairest England has to show, par- 
ticularly matrons, the younger women, and 
stockbrokers. For the Englishwoman the 
daily round would lose its saltness did she 
not have handy the newest six-shilling novel 
by Mr. Caine, Miss Corelli, or the next literary 
bawler in the market-place. There are shops 



Fiction 115 

called "libraries," to which the English- 
woman repairs for her supplies of literary 
pabulum. Here the six-shilling novel has a 
great time. Strapped together in sixes, or 
packed in boxes of dozens, it is handed forth 
to the carriages of its fair devourers, and 
taken right away to its repose in the cult- 
ured homes of Bayswater and Kensington. 
From morning till night many Englishwomen 
do little but read this precious stuff. What 
they get out of it amounts in the long run to 
hysteria and anasmia. It brings about a 
general deadening of the mind and a 
general jaggedness of the emotions, coupled 
with an utter incapacity to take any save an 
exaggerated view of the facts of life. Dis- 
content, disillusionment, ennui, boredom, 
ill-temper, a sharp tongue, and a cynical 
spirit are other symptoms which the six- 
shilling novel is prone to evoke. The habit 
is worse than opium or haschisch or tea 
cigarettes. It is just the devil, and that is 
all you need say about it. The persons em- 
ployed in the opium traffic are supposed to 



n6 The Egregious English 

be very wicked. To my mind, the persons 
employed in the fiction traffic are as wicked 
as wicked can be. When the foul disease 
began first to make its ravages obvious, there 
were not wanting persons who would have 
checked it and provided remedies for it. 
These persons squeaked somewhat, and 
nothing more has been heard of them. So 
the thing goes on unrestrained, and even ap- 
plauded by press and pulpit alike; and the 
Englishwoman has become a confirmed, in- 
veterate, and incurable fiction-reader. If a 
man have an enemy to whom he would do 
an abiding injury, let him persuade that 
enemy to obtain the six more popular six- 
shilling novels of the moment, and read 
them through. If the man's enemy sticks 
to his bargain — at which, however, he will 
probably shy in the middle of the second 
volume — the chances are that he gets up 
from that reading a broken and spiritless 
man. His brain will be as saggy as a sponge 
full of treacle, and his vision as unreliable 
as that of the alcoholist who always saw two 



Fiction 117 

cabs, and invariably got into the one that 
was not there. 

Seriously, however, what is there about 
this English fiction — or, for that matter, 
about Scottish fiction — that men and women 
should buy it and devour it to the exclusion 
of all other literary fare? It is ill- writ ten, it 
is not original, it is not like life, it is not beau- 
tiful, it is not inspiring, it does not touch the 
profound emotions, it means nothing, and it 
ends nowhere. The reason of its popularity 
is, that it appeals to an indolent habit of 
mind, and, as a general rule, is calculated to 
excite the passions, and particularly to open 
up questions which experience has shown to 
be best left alone. In nine cases out of ten, 
where a popular work of fiction is concerned, 
it is always possible to put one's finger on 
the chapter or passages on which its popul- 
arity is based ; and in nine cases out of ten 
that chapter or those passages have to do 
with sexual matters. The questions which 
arise out of the relation of man and woman 
are no doubt vitally important and most 



n8 The Egregious English 

interesting ; but that they should be discussed 
in an unscientific, irresponsible, and catch- 
penny way by everybody who can trail a 
pen is something of a scandal. If an author 
can succeed in inventing a sexual situation 
which could not by any possible chance 
exist for a moment in real life, or if he can 
put a glow and a gloss on the tritenesses of 
love and lust, his success as a fictionist is to 
all intents and purposes assured. What is 
sometimes spoken of as wholesome fiction 
scarcely exists — anyway, nobody reads it. 
It is the carefully constructed book about 
sex that sells and is read. Such a book need 
not be flagrant, as was once thought to be 
the case ; it can be " a work of art " — a thing 
of veiled suggestion, delicate, unobjection- 
able, and seemingly meet to be read. 

One has hesitation in asserting that such 
books ought not to be written or ought not 
to be circulated. It is difficult to justify 
any attitude of intolerance in such a mat- 
ter ; yet the fact remains that the maids and 
matrons of England, together with the men 



Fiction 119 

who have the leisure and sufficient lack of 
brains to read fiction, are being stuffed 
season by season and year by year with 
about the most undesirable kind of sexual 
philosophy that could well be placed before 
them. Of any Englishwoman of the leisured 
class above the age of sixteen years it may 
be said, as was said of the late Professor 
Jowett in a different sense, "What I don't 
know is n't knowledge." And the instructor 
in all cases is a fictionist. If a man took his 
notion of business, or politics, or art, out of 
six-shilling novels, he would be set down for 
a fool. Yet most Englishwomen get their 
view of love and the married relation from 
these extraordinary works, and it is taken 
for granted that nobody is a penny the worse. 
For my own part, I should incline to the 
opinion that the only persons who are a 
penny, not to say six shillings, the worse, are 
the English middle and upper classes as a 
body. 

Much has been said in derision of what the 
English call the Kailyard school of fiction — 



120 The Egregious English 

Kailyard fiction being, I need scarcely say, 
a brand of fiction written by Scotsmen usu- 
ally in Scotland, and sold in the English and 
the American markets. Everybody of taste 
and judgment cheerfully admits that Kail- 
yarders are not persons of genius. For the 
delectation of the Southerner they have 
made a Scotland of their own, the which, 
however, is not Scotland. They have made 
a Scottish sentiment, a Scottish point of 
view, a Scottish humour, a Scottish pathos, 
and even a Scottish dialect, which may be 
reckoned quite doubtful. At the same time, 
one looks in vain to the Kailyarders for any- 
thing that is worse than slobber — anything 
really noxious and dreadful, that is to say. 
One might read Kailyard for ever and a day 
without coming to great moral grief. In- 
deed, I would point out that, on the whole, 
the Kailyard system of ethics partakes some- 
what of the character of the system of ethics 
which used to be unfolded in the melodrama 
of our grandfathers' days. Virtue rewarded, 
vice punished, is the moral upshot of it. 



Fiction 1 2 1 

And in any case, and let it be as bad and as 
meretricious and as greatly to be deprecated 
as one will, we must always remember that 
the Kailyard book is a work invented and 
manufactured, not for Scotsmen, but for the 
Anglo-Saxon — the Englishman and his off- 
shoots. 

Some months back a considerable hubbub 
arose in English literary circles because M. 
Jules Verne had been saying to an inter- 
viewer, at Amiens of all places in the world! 
that the novel as a form of literary expres- 
sion was doomed, and would gradually die 
out of popular favour. It is safe to say that, 
in the eyes of sundry critics of pretty well 
every nationality, the novel has been doomed 
any time this last fifty years. Yet the novel 
comes up smiling every time. Since it was 
reduced in price to six shillings in England 
it has undoubtedly deteriorated, not only as 
a piece of writing, but also in the matter of 
ethical intention. So long as it remains the 
prey of some of its latter-day exploiters, so 
long will it continue to deteriorate. So long 



122 The Egregious English 

as the English mind continues to be feeble 
and unwholesome, and to yearn for artificial 
thrills and undesirable emotions, so long will 
English fiction continue to be of its present 
decadent quality. As the capitalist says, it 
is all a question of supply and demand. The 
great aim of writers of fiction, or at any rate 
of ninety-nine per cent, of them, is to pro- 
duce an article that will sell. You must turn 
out what the public want, and they will 
assuredly buy it. The knack of hitting the 
public taste looks easy to acquire, and the 
fictionist strives after it with all his might. 
Many are called to make fortunes out of 
novel-writing : few are chosen. But nobody 
can examine the work of those few without 
perceiving that for weal or woe — principally 
for woe — they know their business. 

Of course, it goes without saying that a 
very considerable amount of fiction is pub- 
lished in England which is just as mild and 
just as innocuous as tinned milk. To this 
puling variety of fiction, however, the Eng- 
lish do not appear to be very greatly drawn. 



Fiction 123 

It crops up with great regularity every pub- 
lishing season, it is solemnly reviewed in the 
critical journals, and it even stands shoulder 
by shoulder with stronger meat in the book- 
shops. But the fact remains that it does not 
sell; to see ''Second Edition" on it is the 
rarest occurrence. In fine, the English will 
have their fiction spiced, and highly spiced, 
or not at all. Mealy mouthed writers, over- 
reticent, over-blushful, over-austere writers, 
they do not want; neither have they any 
admiration for a writer who is plagued with 
a feeling for style, and who may be reckoned 
an artist in the collocation of words. Their 
much-vaunted Meredith has never had the 
sale of a Crockett or a Barrie or a Hocking, 
or, for that matter, of a J. K. Jerome. The 
English have little or no literary taste, little 
or no literary acumen, and they expect their 
fictionists to give them anything and every- 
thing save what is edifying. 



CHAPTER XIII 

SUBURBANISM 

Of old — that is to say, twenty years ago — 
the great majority of the English people suf- 
fered from a mental and general disability 
which was termed "provincialism." If you 
hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool, or 
Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the 
kind gentlemen in London who size people 
up and put them in their places assured you 
that you were a provincial, and that you 
would have to rub shoulders a great deal with 
the world — by which they meant London — 
before you could rightly consider yourself 
qualified to exist. Against the epithet "pro- 
vincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, 
when it was applied flatly to themselves. 
Most men of feeling felt hurt when you called 
124 



Suburbanism 125 

them provincial. In the world of letters and 
journalism to call a man provincial was the 
last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually 
settled him, just as to say that he has no 
sense of humour settles him to-day. Then 
up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchan- 
an and a few lesser lights, who said, "You 
call us provincials: provincials we undoubt- 
edly are, and we glory in the character." 
This rather baffled, not to say amazed, the 
lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually 
the term "provincial," as a term of oppro- 
brium, passed out of use. 

It is admitted now on all hands that the 
provincial is a very useful kind of fellow ; and 
when the metropolis feels itself running 
short of talent and energy, the provincial is 
invariably invited to look in. Latterly, how- 
ever, the Londoner and the dweller in Eng- 
lish provincial cities have begun to exhibit a 
distinctly modern disorder, which may be 
called, for want of a better term, " suburban- 
ism." In London, which may be taken as 
the type of all English cities, suburbanism is 



126 The Egregious English 

pretty well rampant. It has its origin in 
what the Americans would call "location." 
A man's daily work lies, say, in the City or 
in the central quarters of London. For vari- 
ous reasons — such, for example, as consid- 
erations of health, expenditure, and custom 
— it is practically impossible for him to 
live near his work. He must live some- 
where; so he goes to Balham, or Tooting, 
or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or 
Willesden, or Finchley, or Crouch End, or 
Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat. 
London is ringed round with these residential 
quarters, these little towns outside the walls. 
A visitor to any one of them is at once 
struck with its striking and painful similar- 
ity to all the others. There is a railway sta- 
tion belonging to one of the metropolitan 
lines; there is a High Street, fronted with 
lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is a 
reasonable sprinkling of churches and chap- 
els; there is a brand-new red-brick theatre; 
and the rest is row on row and row on row 
of villa residences, each with its dreary pali- 



Suburbanism 127 

sading and attenuated grass-plot in front, 
and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, 
behind. Miles and miles of these villas exist 
in every metropolitan suburb worth the 
name; and though the rents and sizes of 
them may vary, they are all built to one 
architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, 
ostentatious, and unlovely. No person of 
judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the 
philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them with- 
out concluding at once that the English do 
not know how to live. Take a street of these 
villas, big or little, and what do you find? 
You note, first, that nearly every house, be 
it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or pro- 
fessional man, has got a highfalutin name 
of its own. The County Council or local 
authority has already bestowed upon it a 
number. But this is not enough for your 
suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for 
his house a name which will look swagger on 
his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham 
Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham 
Road, Tooting, at all; but The Laurels, if 



128 The Egregious English 

you please. No. 4 — not to be outdone — is 
Holmwood; No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The 
Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and so 
forth. Then, again, if you walk down a 
street and keep your eye on the front win- 
dows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you 
will note that every one of those windows 
has cheap lace curtains to it, and that im- 
mediately behind the centre of the window 
there is a little table, upon which loving 
hands have placed a green high-art vase, 
containing a plant of sorts. And right back 
in the dimness of the parlour there is a side- 
board with a high mirrored back. 

If you made acquaintance with half a 
dozen of the occupiers of these houses, 
and were invited into the half dozen front 
rooms, you would find in each, in addition 
to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano 
of questionable manufacture, a brass music- 
stool with a red velvet cushion, an over- 
mantel with mirrored panels, a " saddle-bag 
suite," consisting of lady's and gent's and 
six ordinary chairs and a couch; a centre- 



Suburbanism 129 

table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bam- 
boo bookcase containing a Corelli and a Hall 
Caine or so, together with some sixpenny 
Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain- 
sales, Nuttall's Dictionary, Mrs. Beeton's 
House Book, a Bible, a Prayer Book, some 
hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks wait- 
ing to be darned, and a little pile of music, 
chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs 
comes home to The Laurels, he has an apo- 
logy for late dinner, gets into his slippers, 
and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his 
elder daughter, into that parlour. There he 
reads a halfpenny newspaper till there is 
nothing left in it to read; then he talks to 
Mrs. Spriggs about that beast So-and-so, his 
employer ; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him not to 
grumble so much, and asks the elder daugh- 
ter why she does n't play a chune to 'liven us 
up a bit. " Yes," says Spriggs, " what is the 
good of having a piano, and me buying you 
music every Saturday, if you never play?" 
Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through 
Dolly Gray, The Honeysuckle and the Bee, and 



i3° The Egregious English 

Everybody 's Loved by Some One; and Spriggs 
beats time with his foot till he grows weary, 
and thinks we had better have supper and 
get off to bed. 

This kind of thing is going on right down 
both sides of Sandringham Road — at Holm- 
wood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at 
Sutherland House, as well as at The Laurels 
— every week-day evening between the hours 
of eight and midnight. In point of fact, it 
is going on all over Tooting. It is the sub- 
urban notion of an 'appy evening at home; 
and, hallowed as it is by wont and custom, 
everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best 
that life can offer after business hours. Per- 
haps it is. Just before supper, or haply a 
little afterwards, however, Spriggs says that 
he believes he will take a little stroll " round 
the houses." He puts on a straw hat in 
summer and a tweed cap in winter, and pro- 
ceeds gravely down the Sandringham Road 
until he reaches a break in the long array of 
villas, and is aware of a rather flaring public- 
house. Into the saloon bar of this hostelry 



Suburbanism 13 1 

he walks staidly, nods to the company, and 
asks the barmaid for a drop of the usual. 
" Let me see," says that sweet lady ; "Johnny 
Walker, is n't it?" " Well, you know it is," 
says Spriggs, as he hands over threepence. 
With the glass of whisky in his hand he re- 
tires to the nearest red plush settee, and 
looks listlessly at the illustrated papers on 
the little table in front of him, drinks some- 
what slowly, smokes a pipe, exchanges a 
word about the weather with the landlord of 
the establishment, says there's time for an- 
other before closing time, has another, and 
at twelve-thirty trots off home. 

The seven or eight other men in the saloon 
bar being respectively the occupiers of Holm- 
wood, Hazledene, The Pines, Sutherland 
House, etc., have done almost exactly as 
Spriggs has done in the way of drinks and 
nods and illustrated papers and having a 
final at twenty minutes past twelve. But 
during the whole evening they have not ex- 
changed a rational word with one another. 
They have nothing to talk about; therefore 



i3 2 The Egregious English 

they have not talked. They are neighbours, 
and they know it; but they all hold them- 
selves to be so much superior to one another 
that they have scorned to speak to each 
other, except in the most cursory and casual 
way. Next morning, at a few minutes to 
nine o'clock, they will all be scooting anx- 
iously along the Sandringham Road with 
set faces, damp brows, and a fear at their 
hearts that they are going to miss their 
train. They will travel in packed carriages, 
half of them standing up, while the other 
half growls, to Ludgate Hill or Moorgate 
Street, as the case may be, and then rush off 
again to their respective offices, in fear and 
trembling this time lest they should be three 
minutes late and the " governor' ' might 
notice it. 

This is the life of the males in the Sand- 
ringham Road year in and year out. Through 
living in the same houses, in the midst of the 
same furniture, listening to the same pianos, 
drinking at the same public-houses, going to 
business in the same trains, they become as 



Suburbanism 133 

like one another as peas. They are all anx- 
ious, all dull, all short of sleep, all short of 
money. In brief, they have become suburb- 
anized. The monotony and snobbery and 
listlessness of their home life are reflected in 
their conduct of the working-day's affairs. 
There is not a man amongst them who has a 
soul above his job. Each of them sticks at 
business, not because he loves it or likes it, 
but simply because he knows that, if he were 
discovered in a remissness, he would get 
what he calls "the sack." Each of them 
"lunches" — oh, this English lunch! — at the 
bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer 
and a penny Welsh rare-bit. Each of them 
feels a bit chippy and not a little sleepy of 
an afternoon, and each of them races for his 
train in the evening, chock-full of worry and 
bad-temper. You must live in the suburbs 
if you are to live in London at all, and there 
is no escape from it. 

The lines of the female suburbians are cast 
in more or less pleasant places. They do 
not need to go to town every day. There 



134 The Egregious English 

are shops galore, filled with just the goods 
they want, round the corner; and there is 
always the next female on both sides to gos- 
sip with. For, unlike the male suburbian, 
the female suburbian will talk to her neigh- 
bours. Her conversation is of babes, and 
butchers' meat, and the piece at the theatre, 
and the bargains at the stores in the High 
Road, and "him." He, or "him," means 
the good lady's husband. She never by any 
chance refers to him either by his Christian 
name, or his surname, or as "my husband." 
It is always, "He said to me this morning," 
or, "As I was saying to him before he went 
to business," — which, I take it, is a peculiarly 
English habit. The female suburbian goes 
out to tea sometimes, usually at the house 
of some suburban relative. Her dress is a 
curious blend of ostentation and economy. 
She will be in the fashion; and, being an 
Englishwoman, "expense is no object," pro- 
viding she can get the money. She has no 
notion of thrift ; she is perennially in arrears 
with the milk and the insurance man ; and 



Suburbanism 135 

when money gets very tight indeed, she lec- 
tures her husband on his wicked inability to 
make more than he is getting. The whole 
life, whether for male or female, is dreary, 
harried, unrelieved, and destructive of every- 
thing that tends to make life affable and 
tolerable. 

In view of the obvious evils suburbanism 
has brought about in the English metropolis, 
it might have been expected that the Eng- 
lish provincial cities would have done their 
best to avoid similar troubles in their own 
areas. So far from this being the case, how- 
ever, the craze for suburbanism is making 
itself apparent wherever one turns. City 
and borough councils lead the way by erect- 
ing, at the public expense, artisans' and 
clerks' dwellings well out of the town. They 
hold that fresh air, the open country, and 
cheap railway fares are all that is wanted to 
make the English citizen's life a perennial 
joy to him. Yet the dwellings they erect 
are of the shoddiest and least homelike kind, 
the fresh-air which is to do the worker and 



13 6 The Egregious English 

the children so much good is a doubtful 
quantity, and the cheap railway fares are 
bragged about without regard to the time 
taken up in travelling and the hurry and 
anxiety to catch trains. Suburbanism as a 
stereotyped and soul-deadening institution is 
of purely English origin. In no other coun- 
try in the world do convention and what 
other people will say so rule the lives of men 
as they do in England. Suburbanism is in 
many ways the most obvious of the many 
products of English convention. It is at 
once an indication of brainlessness, want of 
intelligence, and incipient decay. Appar- 
ently there is to be no limit to it. Outside 
London new suburbs spring up almost weekly. 
But their newness brings no changes in its 
train. Each new suburb is mapped out and 
built exactly on the lines of the old ones; 
each is destined for the reception of exactly 
the same kind of stupid people ; each will be 
the living-ground of generations of people 
still more stupid. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE MAN-ABOUT-TOWN 

The English man-about-town — and I am 
not acquainted with any other sort — is, to 
put it mildly, a devil of a fellow. Who he 
may be, how he gets a living, whether he gets a 
living, how and why he became a man-about- 
town, and whether, after all, he is really a 
man-about-town, are matters which are wrapt 
in mystery. Everybody knows him, yet no- 
body knows much about him. You meet 
him everywhere, yet nobody can tell you 
how he gets there. His acquaintance is as- 
tonishing, ranging from dustmen to dukes, as 
it were; he cuts nobody, though he is inti- 
mate with nobody; he is familiar with his 
world and all that it expects of him ; and he 
plays the game skilfully, correctly, and as a 
137 



138 The Egregious English 

gentleman should. There are droves of him 
in London; probably no other city in the 
world could, with comfort, accommodate so 
many of him. He lives in the sun ; he is the 
joy and pride of the restaurateurs' and the 
cafe-keepers' hearts ; no billiard-room is com- 
plete without him; he shines at bars of 
onyx; music-halls and theatres could not 
get on without him ; and, on the whole, it is 
his useful and pleasing function to keep the 
West End of London and its offshoots going. 
What the West End of London means to the 
man about -town is a large question. It 
means clubs in the morning, with a tailor, a 
hatter, a bookmaker or two, thrown in; it 
means expensive lunches, lazy, somnolent 
afternoons, big dinners, hard drinking, cards, 
night clubs, and a day that ends at three 
o'clock in the morning. Nobody but an 
Englishman could stand the racket ; nobody 
but an Englishman could find satisfaction in 
so doing. 

The man-about-town is the last expression 
of an unhealthy plutocracy; he is the child 



The Man-About-Town 139 

of means, the son of his father, the pam- 
pered darling of his mother; and he has 
never understood that life was anything 
more than a frivolous holiday. Whether he 
has money or happens to have spent it all, 
he sets the standard of expenditure for 
everybody who would be considered in the 
movement. He also sets the fashion in hats, 
coats, trousers, fancy waistcoats, shoes, walk- 
ing-sticks, and scarf-pins for Englishmen at 
large. It never occurs to him that he does 
this, but he does it. He it is, too, who is 
the prime supporter and patron of the manly 
English sports, horse-racing, glove-fighting, 
coaching, moting, polo, shooting, fishing, 
yachting, and so forth. In these exercises 
he finds great delight. When he is not busy 
dining and wining and painting the town 
red, sport is the mainstay of his existence. 

He is usually young till he reaches the 
age of thirty, when he begins to decline rap- 
idly. But the older he gets the younger he 
gets. Although he may lose his hair, and be 
compelled to have resort to false teeth and 



140 The Egregious English 

elastic stockings, his spirits are invariably of 
the cheerfullest, his laugh is boisterous, his 
interest in life acute, and he continues to be 
passionately fond of food and drink. It is 
not till his locks become hoar, his purse well- 
nigh empty, and the number of his years 
well over threescore- and-t en that he begins 
to droop. Englishmen will point him out 
to you in cafes, and say with hushed voices, 
"You see that man, — the one with the 
frowsy beard and his hat atilt — well, he 
spent a hundred and fifty thousand twice! 
A hundred and fifty thousand, my boy! 
What did he do with it? Oh, well, what do 
people do with money? There's a man, sir, 
that's seen life: used to have a house in 
Berkeley Square; has owned three Derby 
winners ; built the Thingamybob Theatre for 
Miss Jumpabouty; knows everybody; has 
hobnobbed with the King when he was 
Prince of Wales; used to be hand-in-glove 

with the Duke of and that crowd ; and 

now, damme! he has n't a pennypiece." 
All this with the air of a person who is 



The Man-About-Town 141 

showing you something worth seeing. It is 
the English fatuity, first of all, to admire the 
man who is possessed of wealth; secondly, 
to admire a man who is throwing his money 
away; and, thirdly, to look with respectful 
awe upon the man who has thrown it away. 
It warms the English heart and fires the 
English imagination to see the son of a re- 
cently deceased provision-dealer playing the 
prince at the best hotels, plunging at Ascot 
and Monte Carlo, buying up the stalls at the 
Frivolity at the behest of Lottie Flutterfast, 
and generally flinging to the winds the hard- 
earned and, to a great extent, ill-gotten 
estate of his late lamented parent. By all 
the best people — by all the best English 
people, that is to say — such a youth is re- 
ceived and made welcome, if not exactly 
taken to the bosom. Englishmen ask him to 
dinner simply because he has money. They 
are aware that his courses will not bear ex- 
amination, that his tastes are gross, that his 
intellect is none of the brightest. He has 
nothing to say for himself; he is neither 



i4 2 The Egregious English 

entertaining, nor amusing, nor instructive. 
The Englishman has no ulterior designs upon 
him ; he does not hope to get him into this 
or that financial swim, neither does he desire 
to marry his daughter to him ; he simply feels 
that it is well to be friendly with money and 
the man-about-town. 

Even a bankrupt or " broke" man-about- 
town is better to the Englishman than none 
at all. With such a person he will foregather 
and be pleasant in the sight of all men. 
"Old So-and-so," he says, "is a dear old 
sort. He is broke, of course, and sometimes 
he rather worries one for sovereigns. But I 
have never deserted a pal in adversity in my 
life, and I am not going to begin with Old 
So-and-so." Thus your good snob English- 
man would lead you to believe that he was 
on terms of intimacy and affection with Old 
So-and-so in Old So-and-so's palmy money- 
squandering days. Whereas, in point of fact, 
he never clapped eyes on the man till he had 
spent his last farthing. 

It is all very English, and to a mere Scot 



The Man-About-Town 143 

a trifle astonishing. The Scot, if I know 
him at all, takes no joys of spendthrifts, how- 
ever prettily dressed, and, least of all, can 
he be brought to court the society of a man 
who has reduced himself to beggary by ex- 
travagance and riot. The bare gift of pro- 
digality and the bare reputation of having 
been wealthy are nothing to the Scot. If he 
wants men to admire, he can find men of sol- 
ider quality. The Englishman, on the other 
hand, has no great love for either solidity or 
worth; the first makes him envious; the 
second bores him. Though he may himself 
be a person of judgment and sober life, he 
likes to have about him men who are going 
or who have gone the whole hog, and who 
pursue their pleasures without restraint, re- 
morse, or fear. Hence the man-about-town 
will always figure interestingly in English 
society. There is romance about him. He 
has been foolish, and perhaps even wicked; 
but he belongs to the select coterie of people 
who, when all is said, make the gay world 
go round. 



CHAPTER XV 

DRINK 

Mr. Crosland has very kindly suggested 
that "under the inspiring tutelage of the na- 
tional bard Scotland has become one of the 
drunkenest nations in the world." I shall 
not retaliate as one might do, but shall con- 
tent myself by referring the reader to the 
easily accessible tables of statistics, which 
render it quite plain that Scotland's drunken- 
ness is very considerably exceeded by the 
drunkenness of England. 

In London, at any rate, strong drink flows 
like a river. There are 5300 licensed houses 
in the metropolitan area alone. In Kilburn, 
a suburb of more or less irreproachable re- 
spectability, there are twenty-five churches 
and chapels and thirty-five public-houses. 
144 



Drink 145 

During late years public -house property has 
begun to be looked upon in the light of a 
gilt-edged investment. Turn where one will, 
one finds the older inns are being swept 
away, while on their sites are erected flaring 
gin-palaces, with plate-glass fronts, elab- 
orate mahogany fitments, gorgeous saloon 
and private bars, painted ceilings, inlaid 
floors, and electric light throughout. Be- 
hind the bar, instead of mine host of a 
former day and his wife and daughter, there 
are half a dozen perked-up barmaids with 
rouged cheeks and Rossetti hair, and a per- 
son called the manager, who for £2 a week 
runs the place for its proprietors — a Limited 
Company, which owns, perhaps, twenty or 
thirty other houses. In the conduct of these 
mammoth drinking-places three great points 
are kept in view: namely, that a quick- 
drinking, stand-up trade pays better than 
any amount of slow regular custom ; that the 
English drinker of the lower class cannot tell 
the difference between good drink and bad, 
often preferring, indeed, the bad to the good ; 



H 6 The Egregious English 

and that, as bad liquor is cheaper than good, 
the sound commercial thing to do is to sup- 
ply bad liquor. 

With these admirable axioms continually 
before it, the English trade has prospered 
amazingly. More drink and worse drink is 
sold in England to-day than has ever been 
sold in England before. Through legislation 
intended to ensure sound liquor and the 
proper conduct of licensed houses the pro- 
prietors have consistently made a point of 
driving the usual brewer's dray. "In order 
to meet the Food and Drugs Adulteration 
Act, all spirits sold at this establishment, 
while of the same excellent quality as hereto- 
fore, are diluted according to strength." 
"The same excellent quality as heretofore" 
is choice, and so is "diluted according to 
strength." As for the beer, we dilute also 
the beer according to strength. When we 
are caught at it, it is a mistake on the part of 
the cellarman, who has been discharged ; and 
the fine is so small in proportion to the profit 
on selling water, that we smile at the back of 



Drink 147 

our necks and keep on diluting according to 
strength. Our whole system, in fact, is de- 
signed to make people drink, and to make 
them drink the worst that we dare put be- 
fore them. 

Now, the Scot, drunkard or no drunkard, 
does have something of a taste in liquor. 
The best clarets have gone to Scotland (in 
spite of Mr. Crosland) since claret became a 
dinner wine. You cannot put off a Scot with 
either bad whisky or bad beer. He knows 
what whisky should be and what beer should 
be, and in Scotland, at any rate, he never 
has any difficulty in getting them. But the 
English, taking them in the mass, are quite 
the other way. Any sort of wine, provided 
it be properly fortified and sophisticated, 
passes with them for the real thing. Their 
Scotch whisky is about the most wholesome 
thing they drink; but large quantities of 
this are bought by English merchants in a 
crude state, and rammed down the public 
throat without a thought to maturing, 
blending, and otherwise rendering the spirit 



1 48 The Egregious English 

potable. English beer, we have been told in 
song and story, is the finest beer in the 
world. Yet nobody can visit an English 
brewery without discovering that English 
beer is not English beer at all. Glucose in 
the place of malt, quassia and gentian in the 
place of hops, finings in the place of storage, 
are the universal order; and so depraved 
and perverted has the fine old English taste 
in beer become that brewers who have set up 
to provide an honest article and sent it out 
to their customers have had it returned with 
the curt comment that "nobody would drink 
such hog-wash, and what the customers 
wanted was beer, and not brewer's apron." 
Every now and again scares crop up in con- 
sequence of the use of improper ingredients ; 
there is an inquiry, a Royal Commission, and 
the Englishman still goes on stolidly drink- 
ing. Arsenic will not drive him away from 
his favourite tipple, neither will cocculus in- 
dicus or any of the round dozen abomina- 
tions upon which the brewer's chemist takes 
his stand. 



Drink 149 

If there is one thing more than another 
that is considered the chief necessity of life 
in the English household of the poorer class, 
it is beer, and its sister beverage, porter. 
From morning till night the can is continu- 
ally going between the house of the artisan 
and the neighbouring ''public." The first 
thing in the morning the artisan himself 
must have a couple of goes of rum and milk ; 
by eleven o'clock he is ready for a pint of 
four-half; at noon, when he knocks off for 
dinner, he will imbibe a quart or more of the 
same beverage ; and at night, after work, he 
sits in the taproom till closing-time, and 
drinks as much as ever he can pay for or 
chalk up. Meanwhile, his wife must have 
her drop of porter in the morning, her 
drop of bitter to dinner, and her drop of 
something hot before going to bed. Also on 
Saturday afternoons, when the twain go mar- 
keting together, they must have a few drinks, 
just to show there is no ill-feeling ; while on 
Saturday night the artisan not infrequently 
improves the shining hours by "getting 



150 The Egregious English 

blind," to use his own elegant phrase. Thus 
it quite commonly happens that a third and 
even a half of the total income of a house- 
hold of the artisan class is spent in alcohol. 
Thrift, provision for a rainy day and for old 
age, become an impossibility. Underfeed- 
ing usually walks hand in hand with over- 
drinking ; the man loses his nerve, the woman 
her comeliness and her capacity ; and the end 
is pauperism and a pauper's grave, if nothing 
worse. 

Among the English middle and upper 
classes there is distinctly a greater tendency 
to moderation than among the lower classes. 
For all that, the middle classes especially can 
point to a great many brilliant examples of 
the fine art of soaking. Publicans, betting- 
men, commercial travellers, proprietors of 
businesses, solicitors' clerks, journalists, and 
the like get through an amount of drinking 
in the course of a day which would probably 
appal even themselves if they kept an ac- 
count of it. " Let's 'ave a drink," is invari- 
ably one of the first phrases dropped when 



Drink 151 

two Englishmen meet. "We'll 'ave an- 
other" is sure to follow; and so is, " 'Ang 
it, man! we must have a final." Among the 
middle classes, too, as also among the upper 
classes, there is a very great deal of secret 
drinking, particularly among women and 
persons whose professional or official posi- 
tions necessitate the maintenance of an 
appearance of extreme respectability. The 
grocer's license and his fine stock of carefully 
selected wines and spirits offer a ready means 
of supply to the female dipsomaniac, who 
would not be seen in a public-house for 
worlds ; besides, gin can be charged as tea in 
a grocery account, and many a bottle of 
brandy has figured in such accounts under 
the innocent pseudonym of "rolled ox- 
tongue." 

Though the English upper classes, as I 
have said, drink with a certain moderation, 
their moderation really embraces a quantity 
of liquor which would send the artisan quite 
off his head. Whiskies-and-sodas at noon, 
Burgundy at lunch, with cognac to one's 



15 2 The Egregious English 

coffee, three kinds of wine at dinner, fol- 
lowed by liqueurs and whisky, make no 
appreciable mark on a man who is living at 
his ease and can sleep as long as he likes; 
but the sum total of alcohol is quite consid- 
erable, and probably greater than that con- 
sumed by the " drunken sot" for whom my 
lord has such contempt. 

Of English drinking, generally, one may 
remark that it is done in a very deliberate 
and unsociable way. The English cannot be 
said to drink for company's sake. They do 
not foregather and carry on their drinking 
merrily. In their cups they are neither 
witty nor happy, but just dull and dour and 
inclined to be quarrelsome. They drink for 
drinking'ssake, — for the sake of intoxication, 
and to drown trouble. I wish them good 
luck and less of their vile concoctions ! 



CHAPTER XVI 

FOOD 

The subject of diet— he prefers to call it 
diet — is apparently one of unlimited interest 
to the Englishman. Meet him where you 
will, he is ever ready to discuss, first, the 
weather, and then the things — that is to say, 
the kinds of food — that agree with him. In- 
deed, you could almost stake your life on ex- 
tracting from any strange Englishman you 
happen to come across some such statement 
as, "I can't abide eggs," or, "Veal always 
makes me bilious," within ten minutes of 
opening up a conversation with him. The 
Englishman's house, we are told, is his castle ; 
and the Englishman's hobby, surely, is his 
digestion. In point of fact, ninety-nine per 
cent, of adolescent and adult English people 
153 



154 The Egregious English 

suffer from chronic indigestion in a more 
or less severe form. Flatulence, heartburn, 
colic, and "liver" are the Englishman's mor- 
tal heritage. He is invariably troubled with 
some of them, and quite commonly with all. 
If you relieved him of them he would scarcely 
thank you, because he has nursed them from 
his youth up, and what he really wants is 
amelioration, and not cure. Probably this 
is the reason why in the midst of his wails 
and his unholy talk about diet he continues 
to feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and 
least rational manner that generations of bad 
feeders have been able to develop. 

Of mornings, if you sojourn with an Eng- 
lish family, you will be invited to breakfast 
at half -past eight. Promptly at that hour 
they serve a sort of sickly oatmeal soup, com- 
pounded apparently of milk and sugar, which 
they call porridge. Then follow thick and 
piping-hot coffee with 'am and eggs, fish, or 
a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade 
as a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles 
this menu goes to business belching like a 



Food 155 

torn balloon. By eleven o'clock, however, he 
is ready for a little snack — oysters and cha- 
blis, prawns on toast, a mouthful of bread 
and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something 
of that kind. Then at half -past one there is 
lunch, practically a dinner of several courses, 
or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what 
the English euphoniously term "two veg." 
At tea-time your Englishman must needs 
lave himself in a dish of Orange- Pekoe or 
Bohea, to the accompaniment of lumps of 
cake. And at long and last comes dinner, 
the crowning guzzle of the Englishman's day, 
and a function usually spread over a couple 
of hours. It will be perceived that this gus- 
tatory programme or routine has been copied 
from the French. The French put away two 
good meals per diem, one at noon and the 
other in the evening, and there is no reason 
why the English should not do the same. 
When you come to think of it, dinner in the 
middle of the day is a low, under-bred, un- 
distinguished arrangement ; also not to dine 
at night is to run the risk of not losing one's 



156 The Egregious English 

figure, and of having the neighbours say that 
one cannot afford it. 

The French programme would be all very 
well if it were carried out on French lines 
all through. But it is not. When you say 
" soup" in a French restaurant, it means that 
you will be served with half a dozen table- 
spoonfuls of consomme, or petite marmite, or 
bisque, as the case may be. When the Eng- 
lishman says " soup," he means enough thick 
stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he 
gets it and swallows it. And it is so all down 
the menu — too much of everything, and don't 
you think you can put me off with your 
blooming homoeopathic portions. A liberal 
table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is 
one of the bulwarks of English respectability. 
That bad digestion and talks about diet fol- 
low is nobody's fault. 

This profusion — this overfood, as it were — 
has been brought to its noblest expression by 
the English aristocracy, whose tables liter- 
ally groan with costly viands, whose spits 
are always turning, and whose scullions and 



Food 157 

kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related 
that when a certain duke found it necessary 
to retrench, and was advised by his family 
solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and 
seventh cooks, his grace remarked, "But 
, So-and-so, a man must have a bis- 
cuit!" And the English middle class of 
course faithfully imitates to the best of its 
powers the English upper class, and so on 
through the grades. Among all classes there 
is a rooted prejudice against food that hap- 
pens to be cheap. To this day people who 
eat escallops are rather looked down upon, 
for no other reason than that oysters run you 
into half a crown a dozen, while you can get 
excellent escallops at ninepence. So the her- 
ring, the whiting, and other kinds of cheap 
fish are considered little better than offal by 
persons who can afford to pay for sole and 
salmon. Turtle soup is infinitely to be pre- 
ferred to any other soup in the world because 
it is dearer, and champagne is drunk, not be- 
cause people like it, but because it looks 
swagger and testifies to the possession of 



158 The Egregious English 

means. These gustatory idiosyncrasies are 
purely English, and obviously they are the 
offspring of the English love of display and 
superfluity. 

Among the lower classes the general feed- 
ing, though cheaper, is just as wasteful and 
just as gross. Excluding bread, it consists 
chiefly of inferior cuts of butcher's meat with 
char cuter ie and dried fish thrown in. It has 
been complained against the Scot that he is 
none too clean a feeder, delighting hugely in 
inferior meats. Haggis is held forth as a 
great exemplar in point. But it cannot be 
denied that throughout England the one kind 
of emporium for the sale of comestibles which 
flourishes and is unfailingly popular is the 
pork or ham-and-beef shop. And here what 
do you obtain? Why, exactly the meats 
which gentlemen of the type of Mr. Henley 
describe as offal. They include, in addition 
to pork in and out of season, pig's feet, pig's 
heads, pig's liver and kidneys, pig's blood 
sausages, the ''savoury duck" or mess of 
seasoned remnants, tripe boiled and raw, and 



Food 159 

chitterlings. So that the haggis of Scotland 
is fairly well balanced. I am not suggesting 
for a moment that the English display other 
than a proper judgment in devouring these 
dainties. But if they will favour the pork 
shop and its contents, they can scarcely ex- 
pect to be set down for an angel-bread and 
manna-eating people. 

Perhaps the chief scandal about English 
feeding lies in the condition of the English 
hotels. On the Continent an hotel is an 
establishment for the accommodation of trav- 
ellers requiring food and rest. In England 
an hotel is an establishment for the accom- 
modation of landlords and waiters. "High 
class cuisine," says the tariff card, also 
" wines and spirits of the best selected qual- 
ity." Yet one's experience tells one that, 
though the bill will be heavy, neither the 
cuisine nor the wines will be more than pass- 
able, much less high class. A menu which is 
the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, 
bad cooking, careless service, and a general 
lack of finish, are the things one may expect 



160 The Egregious English 

at an English hotel with the tolerable cer- 
tainty of not being disappointed. To com- 
plain is to draw forth the ill-disguised 
contempt of bibulous head-waiters and the 
stiff apologies of haughty proprietors. But 
beyond that mortal man will never get, be- 
cause the English hotel is an immemorial and 
conservative institution, and as wise in its 
own conceit as the ancient sphinx. Of late 
and in London attempts have been made to 
organise hotels adapted to the best kind of 
requirement. So far as I am aware, only two 
of them have really succeeded, and the 
charges at both places are quite pro- 
hibitive. 

Closely identified, one might almost say 
affiliated, to the English hotel is the English 
railway-buffet, of which so much has been 
said in song and story. The sheer horrible- 
ness of the " refreshments " here provided has 
passed into a proverb. The English them- 
selves admit that if you wish to know the 
worst about refreshments, you should drink 
the railway-buffet tea and partake of the 



Food 161 

railway -buffet sandwich. They also ad- 
mit that for abominations in the way of 
aerated waters, milk, beer, and whisky, pas- 
try, cakes, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats, 
boiled chicken and ham, and chops and 
steaks from the grill, the railway-buffet takes 
the palm; and they admit further that the 
Hebes who dispense these comestibles to the 
hungry and howling mob have the manners 
of duchesses. Yet the English without their 
railway-buffets would be an utterly woe- 
begone and miserable people. Put an Eng- 
lishman down at a strange railway-station 
with a half-hour wait before him. He has 
but one resort: he inquires right off for the 
buffet, and there he gorges and swizzles till 
the warning bell advises him of the departure 
of his train. If there is no buffet, he becomes 
a dejected, pallid man, and threatens to write 
to the newspapers. So long as the railway- 
buffets continue to exist, the English diges- 
tion can never aspire to perfection, even 
though English feeding and cooking outside 
railway-stations became ideal ; for a single 



1 62 The Egregious English 

"meal" of railway-buffet viands would per- 
manently disorganise the digestive capabili- 
ties of the most ostrichy ostrich that ever 
walked on two legs. 



CHAPTER XVII 

LAW AND ORDER 

The English love to be ruled, just as eels 
are said to take delight in being skinned. 
They hold that a nation which is properly 
ruled cannot fail of happiness. Their notion 
of rule may be summed up in the phrase, 
1 ' Law and order. ' ' The Englishman believes 
that law and order are heaven-sent blessings 
especially invented for his behoof. " Where 
else in the world," he will ask you grand- 
iloquently, "do you get such law and such 
order as you get in England — the land of the 
free?" If anybody picks his pocket, or en- 
croaches upon his land, or infringes his patent 
rights, or diverts his water-courses, the Eng- 
lishman knows exactly what to do. There is 
the law. They keep it on tap in great build- 
163 



1 64 The Egregious English 

ings called courts, and persons in wigs serve 
out to you precisely what you may deserve 
with great gusto and solemnity. The man 
picked your pocket, did he? Three months' 
imprisonment for the man. Somebody is 
making colourable imitations of your patent 
dolls' eyes. Well, you can apply for an in- 
junction. And so on. 

This is law. All Englishmen believe in it, 
particularly those who have never had any. 
When it comes to the worst, and the Eng- 
lishman finds that he really must take on a 
little of his own beautiful specific, he usually 
begins by falling into something of a flutter. 
Those bewigged and sedate persons seated in 
great chairs, with bouquets in front of them 
and policemen to bawl "Silence!" for them, 
begin to have a new meaning for the English- 
man. Hitherto he has regarded them com- 
placently as the bodily representatives of the 
law in a free country. He has smacked his 
lips over them, rejoiced in their learning, wit, 
and acumen, warmed at the notion of their 
dignity, and thanked God that he belonged 



Law and Order 165 

to a free people — free England. Now, when 
it comes to a trifling personal encounter be- 
fore this mountain of dignity — this mountain 
of dignity perched on a mountain of prece- 
dent, as it were — the Englishman shivers and 
looks pale. But his solicitor and his counsel 
and his counsel's clerk — particularly his 
counsel's clerk — soon put him at his ease, and 
instead of withdrawing at the feel of the 
bath, he is fain to plump right in. Whether 
he comes out on top or gets beaten is another 
matter; in any case, the trouble about the 
thing is that, win or lose, it is infinitely and 
appallingly costly. Law, the Englishman's 
birthright, is not to be given away. If you 
want any, you must pay for it, and pay for 
it handsomely, too. Otherwise you can go 
without. The English adage to the effect 
that there is one law for the rich and an- 
other for the poor is one of those adages 
which are very subtly true. There is a law 
for the rich, certainly. There is also a law 
for the poor — namely, no law at all. On the 
whole the Englishman who has not had his 



1 66 The Egregious English 

pristine dream of English law shattered by- 
contact with the realities is to envied. All 
other Englishmen, whether their experience 
has lain in County Courts, High Courts, or 
Courts of Appeal, talk lovingly of English 
law with their tongues in their cheeks. 

With respect to order, the much bepraised 
handmaiden of law, I do not think that the 
English get half so much of her as they think 
they do. She costs them a pretty penny. 
The up-keep of her police and magistrates 
and general myrmidons runs the Englishman 
into some noble taxation ; yet where shall you 
find an English community that is orderly if 
even an infinitesimal section of it has made 
up its mind to be otherwise? In London at 
the present moment there are whole districts 
which it is not safe for a decently dressed 
person to traverse even in broad daylight; 
and these districts are not by any means 
slum districts, but parts of the metropolis in 
which lie important arteries of traffic. There 
is not a square mile of the metropolitan area 
which does not boast its organised gang of 



Law and Order 167 

daylight robbers, purse-snatchers, watch- 
snatchers, and bullies who would beat a man 
insensible for fourpence, and whose great 
weapon is the belt. 

For convenience' sake these people have 
been grouped together under the term 
" Hooligan.' ' The police — the far-famed 
London police — can do nothing with them. 
They admit that they are ineradicable and 
irrepressible. The magistrates and the news- 
papers keep on asseverating that ' ' something 
must be done." That something apparently 
consists in the capture of a stray specimen of 
the tribe, who is forthwith given three 
months, with perhaps a little whipping 
thrown in. But hooliganism is a business 
that continues to flourish like the green bay- 
tree, and London is no safer to-day than it 
was in the time of the garotters. As the belt 
is the weapon of the London robber, and as 
Hooligan is his name, so we find in all the 
larger provincial towns gangs of scoundrels 
with special instruments and slang names of 
their own. In Lancashire and the Black 



1 68 The Egregious English 

Country kicking appears to be the favourite 
method of dealing with the order-loving citi- 
zen. In some of the northern towns the 
knuckle-duster, the sand-bag, and the loaded 
stick are requisitioned; and in all cases we 
are told the police are powerless. The fact 
is, that, on the whole, England cannot be 
reckoned an orderly country. The " hooli- 
gans" and their provincial imitators are just 
straws that show the way of the wind. When 
these persons say : " We will do such and such 
things in contravention of the law," there is 
practically nothing to stop them. In the 
same way, when a community determines to 
run amuck on an occasion of "national re- 
joicing" (such as the late Maf eking night), or 
because a strike is in progress, or a charity 
dinner has been badly served, or the vaccina- 
tion laws are being enforced, it does so at its 
own sweet will, and order can be hanged. 
Once a week, too, — namely, on Saturday 
nights, — English order, like the free list at 
the theatres, is entirely suspended. Satur- 
day night is the recognised and inviolable 



Law and Order 169 

hour of the mob. Throughout the country 
your flaring English gin-palaces are at their 
flaringest ; the beer-pumps sing together with 
a myriad voices, and the clink of glasses takes 
the evening air with beauty. Until, perhaps, 
eight o'clock all goes well ; then the quarrel- 
someness which the English masses extract 
from their cups begins to assert itself, and the 
chuckers-out (in what other country in the 
world are there chuckers-out ?) and the police 
begin to be busy. Till long after midnight 
their hands are full, and it is not until the 
Sabbath is a couple of hours old that the 
English masses seek their rest. In the mean- 
time what squalid indiscretions, what sins 
against humanity, what outrages, have not 
been committed? The bare consumption of 
drink alone has been appalling ; the bicker- 
ings, angry shoutings, indulgences in pugilism 
and hair-pulling, have been infinite ; and 
on Monday morning the police-courts will 
have their usual plethora of drunks and 
disorderlies, wife-beatings and assaults on 
the police, with, perhaps, a case or two of 



170 The Egregious English 

manslaughter and a murder to put the crown 
on things. 

In the main, therefore, law and order 
may be counted among John Bull's many 
illusions. They are, as one might say, sweet 
to meditate upon; they look all right on 
paper, and they sound all right in the mouths 
of orators. For the rest the Englishman who 
is wise smiles and keeps a folded tale. One 
may note, before leaving this entertaining 
subject, that in England lawyers and laymen 
alike take a special pride in admitting a cer- 
tain ignorance. At the bare mention of Scots 
law they lift up pious hands and impious 
eyes and say, " Thank Heaven, we know 
nothing about it!" 



CHAPTER XVIII 

EDUCATION 

Lord Rosebery, whom the worthy Mr. 
Crosland dislikes on purely racial grounds, is 
usually credited as the originator of what has 
latterly become the Englishman's watchword, 
"Educate, educate, educate!" Whether it 
was the Scotch half of Lord Rosebery or 
the English half that prompted him to 
this simple human cry, I shall not pretend 
to say. On the other hand, it is certain 
that when his Lordship offered the English 
such a profound piece of advice, he gave 
them exactly the counsel that they most 
needed; for, though the English boast of 
their knowledge, though they are the ar- 
rogant possessors of seats of learning out 
of which can come nothing but perfection, 
171 



17 2 The Egregious English 

though they possess ancient universities and 
ancient public schools, though they have 
a school-board system and free education, 
and though their country is overrun with 
middle-sized men who play billiards and drink 
bitter beer and call themselves schoolmasters, 
they are indubitably and unmistakably an 
uneducated people. 

Until the passing of the Elementary Edu- 
cation Act of 1870, learning in England 
amounted practically to a luxury. Only the 
rich might be permitted to know things. It 
was a case of schools, colleges, and univer- 
sities for the sons of noblemen and gentle- 
men. The rascally lower classes might look 
after themselves. It is open to question 
whether the rascally lower classes were not, 
on the whole, educationally better off in that 
day than they are at present. That, how- 
ever, is by the way. But in the later sixties 
the reformer got his eagle eye on the rascally 
lower classes. He perceived that the rascally 
lower classes were in bad case. They got 
drunk, they used foul language, they smoked 



Education 1 73 

short pipes, and, Heaven help them! they 
could not read. Anticipating the English or 
Scotch half of Lord Rosebery, as the case 
may be, the reformer said, " Educate, edu- 
cate, educate!" And it was so. The Eng- 
lish have been educating ever since. They 
educated to such purpose that thirty years 
later Lord Rosebery felt it incumbent upon 
himself to bid them educate, educate, edu- 
cate! In those thirty years the rascally 
lower classes learned somewhat. They were 
supposed to discover, inter alia, that know- 
ledge was power. They were told that a 
hodman who could write his name was a bet- 
ter hodman than the hodman whose sign- 
manual was a cross. They were led shrewdly 
to infer that their pastors and masters and 
general betters owed their supremacy to 
knowledge; and that if they, the rascally 
lower classes, would only instruct their child- 
ren, these same children might wax great in 
the land and carry burdens no more. The 
rascally lower classes sent their children to 
school, some of them cheerfully, some of them 



174 The Egregious English 

with groans; and the stars began to shine 
over England's darkness. 

What has come to pass all men know. 
Every Englishman gets the smatterings of a 
literary education, and believes in his heart 
that he was cut out by the Almighty to be a 
clerk. The honest trades and handicrafts are 
no longer desirable in the minds of English 
youth. To take one's coat off with a view to 
livelihood is a business for dolts and fools. 
Advertise in England for an office-boy and 
you shall receive five hundred applications; 
advertise for a boy to learn plumbing, and 
you will be offered, perhaps, two daft-looking 
lads, who after much thrashing have managed 
to attain the age of fourteen years. 

The fact is, that the English do not know 
what education means. At the public 
schools, and at the universities of Oxford and 
Cambridge, education has become, to a great 
extent, a social matter. You go to these 
places to learn, certainly; but you also go 
with a view to the formation of a desirable 
and influential acquaintance, and to get upon 



Education 1 75 

your forehead the mark which is supposed 
to make glorious the public-school and uni- 
versity-bred Englishman. As a general rule, 
that mark is altogether imperceptible to the 
eyes of the unelect, who, if the truth must be 
told, discover the university man not so much 
by his manners or conversation as by his 
ineptitudes. When one comes to consider 
the principles upon which the public-school 
and university system are worked, one is 
quite prepared to admit that, were it not for 
the element of snobbery patent in the system, 
English public schools and universities alike 
would in the long run have to be disestab- 
lished. As it is, they are the conventional 
resort of aristocratic adolescence, and per- 
mitted to exist only on condition that, if a 
low middle-class person can find the money 
and keep up the style, he, too, may join the 
angelic host. To the man of temperament, 
to the scholar, to the man who loves learning 
for learning's sake, the English universities 
have precious little to offer. 

After Oxford and Cambridge, one turns to 



176 The Egregious English 

London and the non-resident foundations, 
all of them, I believe, modern. Here, as it 
seems to me, the English err again. Broadly- 
speaking, these institutions, wittingly or un- 
wittingly, devote their energies to the prepar- 
ation of young men for the Civil Service. If 
you are an English board-school teacher at 
£80 a year and you discover that a second- 
class clerk in the Circumlocution Department 
commences at £300 a year, and that, roughly, 
the examination to be passed is the same as 
for matriculation at London, you naturally 
go in bald-headed for matriculation at Lon- 
don. For the learning you get by these 
efforts you have not the smallest respect. If, 
on presenting yourself for examination by the 
Civil Service Commissioners, you come out 
sufficiently high on the list to secure an ap- 
pointment, well and good. If not, your 
labour has been wasted. It is this spirit 
which is at the bottom of the English ignor- 
ance. With them, learning, education, is a 
means to an end, and not in the least its own 
exceeding great reward. Hence a properly 



Education 177 

educated Englishman is almost as rare as a 
blue rose. For the masses — the rascally 
lower orders, that is to say — there are the 
board schools. Here for thirty years past 
has been enacted about the sweetest travesty 
of education that the mind of man could con- 
ceive. For the teaching of the children of 
the rascally lower orders, the wise English 
Government, with the assistance of the wise 
English school boards, has invented what is 
to all intents and purposes a new type of man. 
And his name shall be called Schoolmaster. 
He began Heaven knows how. But if you 
inquire into him, you will find that he has 
spent three years at a Government training 
college, and that prior to this experience he 
was for some years a pupil teacher ; also that 
he is a son of the people, and that his father 
drove an engine or kept a shop. In these 
latter circumstances he was, perhaps, fortun- 
ate. The marvellous fact about him is that, 
in spite of his years of pupil-teachership and 
of his three years at a Government training 
college, he is not a man of either learning or 



178 The Egregious English 

culture. I am told that an English pupil 
teacher is not expected to fash himself by the 
study of either Latin or Greek. Two books 
of Euclid will see him through the stiff est of 
his examinations. He does not need to have 
even a nodding acquaintance with modern 
languages; and as for science, if he really 
wants some, he must pick it up at evening 
classes. Even when he passes into the Gov- 
ernment training college, — where, by the way, 
he is instructed and boarded and lodged 
gratis, — his studies do not become in any 
way profound. The history of England, 
the geography of the world, arithmetic 
according to Barnard Smith, algebra ac- 
cording to Dr. Todhunter, Latin and 
Greek according to Dr. William Smith 
(Part I.), with a little French, — a very 
little French, — bring him to the end of his 
tether. 

Really, the whole business is childish. Any 
youth of average capacity should get through 
the entire three years' course in six weeks. 
Of course, there is the so-called technical 



Education 1 79 

training to reckon with ; that is to say, a man 
at one of these colleges is supposed to spend 
a great deal of his time, and no doubt does, 
in perfecting himself as a teacher; but one 
would have thought that actual practice in 
an ordinary school would be the best instruc- 
tor in this respect. In any case, nobody can 
consider closely the English schoolmaster as 
manufactured at Government training col- 
leges without perceiving that the Govern- 
ment turns out a very remarkable article 
indeed. I have no desire to belittle a hard- 
worked, and probably underpaid, body of 
public servants. Their profession is a thank- 
less one. I do not think for a moment a 
single man of them went into it with his eyes 
open, and I know for a certainty that the 
school boards and the Government between 
them have so hedged it round with petty 
annoyances that a man possessed of feeling 
must loathe it. It is probably this feeling of 
loathing of his work that keeps the English 
schoolmaster down. He knows that it is 
vain for him to go a hair's-breadth out of the 



i8o The Egregious English 

beaten tracks. The school boards must have 
grants; the Government inspectors must be 
satisfied. There is only one method of en- 
suring these desirable consummations: that 
one way amounts to sheer mechanism and 
slog. The English schoolmaster must have 
no temperament. If he possess such a thing, 
he is bound to come to great grief. Hence 
the whole weight of the English system is, 
from first to last, employed in the work of 
knocking temperament out of him and keep- 
ing it out. His three years' free training 
particularly tend to make a slack, unthink- 
ing sap-head of him. He gets a parchment 
which entitles him to call himself a certifi- 
cated teacher, and he is taught to imagine 
that for downright learning there is nothing 
like himself under the sun. In this latter 
surmise he is quite right. The schoolmaster 
in England, though he will probably be an- 
other quarter of a century waking up to the 
fact, counts for next to nothing. Men of 
parts avoid him; men of no parts laugh at 
him. For himself, I imagine, he will long 



Education 181 

continue to believe in his heart that he is a 
great man, a little lower, perhaps, than a 
parson, but certainly a little higher than 
a policeman. 

The real value of English education, like 
the real value of most other things, becomes 
apparent when it is put to the test of practi- 
cal affairs. Any employer of labour will tell 
you that, whether an English boy come to 
him from a board school or a school of a 
higher grade, whether he be the son of a 
ploughman or of what the English call a pro- 
fessional man, he is always and inevitably a 
good deal of a fool. You have to teach him 
how to lick stamps. You have to teach him 
that, excepting in so far as he can write and 
read, what he has learned at school is not 
wanted; you have to teach him how many 
beans make five ; you have to teach him that 
punctuality and accuracy are worth more in 
business than all the botany he ever learned ; 
and all the time you have to watch him like 
a cat watching a mouse. "Fire out the 
fools!" once exclaimed Dr. Robertson Nicoll. 



1 82 The Egregious English 

I do not think it is too much to say that, if 
the average English employer took the hint, 
he would have nobody left to do his business 
for him. 



CHAPTER XIX 

RECREATION 

To amuse oneself is the great art of life. 
From the English point of view, the finest 
kind of amusement is to be obtained by kill- 
ing something. Fox-hunting, deer-stalking, 
grouse-shooting, pheasant-shooting, pigeon- 
shooting, and even rabbit-shooting still stand 
for a great deal among the best class of Eng- 
lishmen. Of old, the masses had their bull- 
baitings, dog-fights, and cock-fights. These, 
however, are no longer regarded as legitimate 
forms of amusement, and the masses, being 
for various reasons unable to hunt foxes and 
shoot pheasants, have to fall back on recrea- 
tions in which killing takes place only by 
accident. There is the race-course and the 
football-field. The masses are expected to 
183 



1 84 The Egregious English 

consider themselves happy. Outside racing 
and football, however, the come-day, go-day 
Englishman has a good many facilities for rec- 
reation. Although in most communities the 
grandfatherly authorities have abolished the 
old feasts and fairs, which provided periodic 
saturnalia of merry-go-rounds and wild-beast 
shows, it is a poor townlet which cannot 
nowadays boast its permanent settlement 
of cocoanut-shiesand shooting-galleries, where 
on Saturday evenings the true-born English- 
man may find substantial joys. Then, for the 
Londoner, in addition to this kind of thing, 
there are from time to time provided vast 
orgies at Hampstead Heath, the Welsh Harp, 
Barnet Fair, and other choice resorts. Here, 
again, it is a case of cocoanuts, shooting-gal- 
leries, swing-boats, steam-roundabouts, and 
aerial flights, backed up with donkey-rides, a 
free use of the tickler and the ladies' teaser, 
unlimited confetti throwing, and unlimited 
beer. These amusements, of course, are on 
the face of them quite innocent, and equally 
English and unintellectual. 



Recreation 185 

Failing merry-go-rounds and cocoanut- 
shies, the delights of which are apt to pall, 
the English masses have still left to them 
their main redoubt of rational enjoyment, 
which, for reasons no man may skill, is called 
the music-hall. The English music-hall is 
practically an expansion or efflorescence of 
the old-fashioned "sing-song." Sixty years 
ago the man who went out to take a stoup of 
ale at his inn was accustomed to be regaled 
with a little music free of charge. Mine host 
had possessed himself of a second-hand piano, 
and secured the services of some broken- 
down musician to play it for him. There 
was a great singing of old songs, and the time 
sped merrily, as it did in the golden age. 
These feasts of harmony brought custom, and 
in course of time the evening " sing-songs " at 
certain hostelries became organised institu- 
tions and were run on lines of great enter- 
prise, the piano being supplemented by an 
orchestra, and the pianist by a number of 
professional singers and entertainers. Within 
the last fifty years the " sing-song" has been 



1 86 The Egregious English 

separated from its parent the alehouse, and 
has developed into the music-hall. To-day 
the English music-halls are almost as thick 
on the ground as churches and chapels. In 
the metropolis you would have a difficulty to 
count them. In the provinces every town 
of size supports two or three halls, and in- 
sists on London talent and London style. 
The class of entertainment provided may be 
costly and amusing, but it is certainly not 
edifying. The performers almost to a man, 
and one might say to a woman, are persons 
who can be considered " artists" only in the 
broadest sense, and whose ignorance and vul- 
garity are as colossal as their salaries. 

Roughly, the entertainment may be di- 
vided into two sections, the one concerned 
with feats of strength, juggling, and the like, 
and the other with laughter-making and 
vocalism. As regards the first of these sec- 
tions, a man who can balance a horse and 
trap on the end of his chin appears to give 
great satisfaction to an English audience. 
Why this should be so, nobody knows. The 



Recreation 187 

good purpose that may be served by balanc- 
ing a horse and trap on the end of one's chin 
is not obvious; but the English masses are 
ravished by the spectacle. They also have 
a great fondness for the stout lady who 
catches cannon-balls on the back of her neck, 
for the other stout lady who risks her life 
nightly on the flying trapeze, for the gentle- 
man who walks about the stage with a piano 
under one arm and a live mule under the 
other, and for the gentleman who rides the 
bicycle standing on his head. To the mind 
of the English masses these are marvels and 
well worth the money. They give a zest to 
life, they provide material for conversation, 
and their attraction seems perennial. 

The great stand-by of the halls, however, 
is the laughter-making and vocal depart- 
ment. Here shine the great stars whose 
names are familiar on English lips as house- 
hold words. Here is purveyed the culture, 
the song, and the humour of the English 
masses. It is from the music-hall stage that 
the vast majority of Englishmen take their 



1 88 The Egregious English 

tone and their sentiment. That renowned 
comedian, Fred Fetchem, strolls on to the 
boards of the Frivolity some night, and, 
assuming a fiendish grin, exclaims idiotically ; 
"There 's 'air!" Next morning and for 
many weeks thereafter all England says; 
"There's 'air!" on any and every occasion. 
" What ho she bumps!" " Now, we sha'n't be 
long," "Not half," "Did he?" and similar 
catchwords, all popular and all meaningless, 
capture the English imagination in their turn, 
and for a season, at any rate, Englishmen can 
say nothing else. It is the same with the 
music-hall song. Always there are current in 
England three or four "songs of the hour," 
which every Englishman worth the name 
sings, whistles, or hums; and always these 
songs, from whatever point of view regarded, 
are of the most blithering and bathotic nat- 
ure. At the present moment the prime and 
universal favourite is that pathetic ditty, 
Everybody 's Loved by Some One. For the 
benefit of the English, I quote the first 
stanza and the chorus of this work : 



Recreation 189 

A lady stood within a busy city, 

Her darling little daughter by her side; 

She'd stopped to buy a bunch of pretty violets 

From a ragged little orphan she espied. 

The words she spoke were kinder than the boy had 

heard for years; 
And in reply to what she asked, he murmur' d through 

his tears, 



Everybody's loved by some one, everybody 

knows that's true, 
Some have father and mother dear ; sister and 

brother, too. 
All the time that I remember, since I was a mite 

so small, 
I seem to be the only one that nobody loves at 

all. 



With this enchanting song the English 
welkin resounds by day and night. The 
great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, 
full of four-ale and bad whisky, howls it in 
chorus at his favourite " public," work-girls 
sing it in factories, mothers rock their chil- 
dren to sleep with it, and every English 
urchin whistles or shouts it at you with un- 
flagging zest. Of course, there are others; 
for example, there is I'm a Policeman, which 
goes like this : 



190 The Egregious English 

In the inky hour of midnight, when the clock is striking 
three, 

As I stroll along my beet-root, many curious things I 
see: 

Ragged urchins stagger past me to their mansions in 
the west; 

Millionaires, through cold and hunger, on our doorsteps 
sink to rest; 

Dirty dustmen in their broughams, off to supper at the 
"Cri."; 

Then "Bill Sykes," the burglar, passes, with an eye- 
glass in his eye. 

Such are the sights I witness when I am on my 

beat, 
Filling my heart with sawdust, filling my boots 

with feet; 
Covering half the pavement up with my "plates 

of meat," 
Though mother sent to say that I 'm a p'liceman — 

which — need one remark? — is intended for 
what the Scots are supposed to call "wut." 
Also, there is He Stopped: 

Pendlebury Plum had a wart on his gum, 

And he rubbed it with sand-paper hard; 
The wart on his gum made Plum fairly hum, 

When it stuck out about half a yard. 
The wart grew so quick, when he rubbed it with a 
brick, 

Till it looked like a short billiard-cue; 
Said Plum to himself, "I shall die on the shelf, 

For I'm darned if I know what to do." 



Recreation 191 

So he went and got a pick- axe and shov'd it 

underneath, 
Then he lifted up his jaw, and he swallowed all 

his teeth; 
Then he stopped! 

The verses I have quoted are a good, true, 
and fair sample of the kind of thing that 
finds favour among the English masses. I 
do not think that anything better is being 
proffered, and it is pretty certain that any- 
thing less inane would be doomed to failure. 
The fact is that the English mind in the lump 
is flat, coarse, and maggoty, and the English 
understanding is as the understanding of 
a feeble and ill-bred child. A couple of 
generations ago the songs popular among 
Englishmen had some claim to coherence, 
decency, and common sense ; nowadays, 
however, the Englishman admits that "he 
cannot sing the old songs." He has gone far- 
ther and fared worse, and among the many 
symptoms of his decadence, none is more 
pronounced than his easy toleration of the 
balderdash that is being served up to him 
by the '"alls." 



CHAPTER XX 

STOCK EXCHANGE 

There is nothing in England more as- 
tounding or more tigerish than the city 
man. Englishmen have a fixed idea that 
they are the soul of generosity, indifferent to 
money, and not in the least sordid. When 
they are put to it for a type of sheer greedi- 
ness it pleases them to point a finger at the 
Scot. Yet there can be no doubt that of 
late years the desire for riches has become 
the absorbing English passion. The osten- 
tation and vulgar displays of the aristocracy 
and the newly rich have stirred the middle- 
class English heart to envy. How comes it 
that such and such a man sleeps on lilies and 
eats roses? He has " means," my friend. 

And what are ''means"? Just money. If 
192 



Stock Exchange 193 

you are going to be happy in this life, if you 
insist upon a full paunch of the choicest — 
upon the ease and softness which are so grate- 
ful to decadent persons, if you would be in a 
position to possess all that the soul of the 
decadent person covets, you really must have 
money. And as you are a middle class Eng- 
lishman whose people have omitted to leave 
you a million or so, it is very awkward for 
you. Life is short ; the cup goes round but 
once. 

You have £500. How is it to be made 
into £50,000, and that while the flush of 
youth still incarnadines your ambitious 
cheek? There is only one way: you must 
speculate — judiciously, if you can; but you 
must speculate. You are an Englishman 
and a sportsman, and sometimes you get 
your £50,000. Then all the world marvels 
and would fain do likewise, so that the ball 
is kept rolling. It is a ball full of money, 
and it rolls cityward. The generous, open- 
handed Englishmen who are the City take as 
much as they want and toss you the balance. 



194 The Egregious English 

The game is as fashionable as ping-pong: 
everybody plays it, and, win or lose, every- 
body calls it the Stock Exchange. I am told 
that the Stock Exchange proper is a reput- 
able institution and essential to the well- 
being of the country. I do not doubt this 
for a moment ; but round it there has grown 
up a specious and parasitical finance which is 
rapidly transforming the English into a 
nation of punters. " Fortunes made while 
you wait," is the lure to which the latter-day 
Englishman has been found infallibly to re- 
spond. The remnant of the common sense 
possessed by his excellent grandparents 
arouses in him a sneaking suspicion that the 
golden promises of the outside broker and 
the bucket-shop keeper are not to be de- 
pended upon. Yet he reads in his morning 
paper that no end of stocks and shares have 
risen a point or dropped a point, as the case 
may be, and he knows that if he had been in 
on the right side he would have made more 
money in a few hours than his excellent 
grandparents could have made in the course 



Stock Exchange 195 

of a whole grubby lifetime. Hence, sooner 
or later, his patrimony, or few hundred of 
surplus capital, is planked into the ball that 
rolls citywards, on the off-chance that it may 
come back arm in arm, as it were, with thou- 
sands. 

Even the more cautious sort of English- 
man, who looks upon speculation with a 
deprecating eye and pins his faith on legiti- 
mate investment, is rapidly descending into 
the gambling habit. Schemes which promise 
fat dividends inflame his imagination and 
drag him out of the even tenor of his way. 
He is perfectly well aware that fifteen, 
twenty, and twenty-five per cent, in return 
for one's money is quite wrong somehow. 
But, on the other hand, the prospect rav- 
ishes, and there are concerns in the world 
which pay such dividends year by year with- 
out turning a hair. Only sometimes there is 
a colossal smash, and half the shopkeepers 
of England put on sackcloth and ashes and 
get up funds for one another's relief. To 
the looker-on the whole system is highly 



19 6 The Egregious English 

diverting; to the players in the game the 
fun will never be obvious. 

The real truth about the matter is simply 
this — the standard of living in England is an 
inflated and artificial standard. Practically 
every Englishman lives, or longs to live, be- 
yond his means. The workman and the 
workman's wife must put on the style of 
the foreman and the foreman's wife, and the 
foreman and the foreman's wife must ap- 
pear to be nearly as comfortably off as the 
manager, the manager as his employer, all 
employers, shopkeepers, factory owners, iron- 
masters, engineers, printers, and even pub- 
lishers as prosperous as each other, and so 
on till you come to dukes, than whom, of 
course, nobody can be more prosperous. It 
would be possible to bring together six Eng- 
lishmen whose incomes ranged from £i ios. 
a week to £50,000 a year, and whose dress 
and tastes would be pretty well identical. 
Fifty years ago the sons of the middle classes 
had really no inclination toward the super- 
fluities. The dandy was rather laughed at 



Stock Exchange 197 

among them, the gourmet was a monster 
they never by any chance encountered, and 
the libertine was a sad warning and a person 
to be eschewed. Nowadays it is all the other 
way: the gilt and tinsel and glamour and 
rapidity of the gay world have captured the 
English understanding and brought it ex- 
ceeding low. There is little moral backbone 
left in the country. Money, money, money, 
to be ill gotten and ill spent, is the English 
ideal. The man who can go without is con- 
sidered a crank or a fool or worse, or he is set 
down for an indolent fellow who should be 
given a month or two on the treadmill for 
luck. The whole duty of man — of English- 
men, that is to say — is to have money in 
ponderable quantities ; the man without it is 
of no account at all. Nobody believes in him, 
nobody wants him, nobody tolerates him. 
He may be wise and witty and chaste and 
blessed with all the virtues, and still be re- 
ceived with great coldness by bank man- 
agers ; and it is well known that the attitude 
of a bank manager towards a man is the 



19S The Egregious English 

attitude of society at large. If the bank man- 
ager beams and rubs his hands, "God's in 
His heaven: all's right with the world." If 
the bank manager frowns and sends you im- 
pertinent letters, you may last a week or a 
fortnight or a few months, but you are on 
thin ice, and you must please take care not 
to forget it. I should not be at all surprised 
if the omnipotent official whose business it is 
to discover what persons are or are not quali- 
fied to approach our British fountain of hon- 
our were one day found to be a bank manager 
in disguise. 

So that, on the whole, the Englishman has 
every inducement to get rich and to be very 
quick about it. His dealings with the 
" Stock Exchange" — that is to say, with the 
City — are but the natural expression of his 
anxiety to oblige all parties concerned. It 
is a pity that getting and spending should 
become the main concerns of his life ; but, as 
he pathetically puts it, "One must do as 
Rome does, and some women are never con- 
tent. ' ' The Stock Exchange is the only way. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE BELOVED 

What is more beautiful or meet to be 
taken to the bosom than the Englishman? 
Everybody loves him ; his goings to and fro 
upon the earth are as the progresses of one 
who has done all men good. He drops fat- 
ness and blessings as he walks. He smiles 
benignity and graciousness and "I-am-glad- 
to-see-you-all-looking-so-well. ,, And before 
him runs one in plush, crying, "Who is the 
most popular man of this footstool?" And 
all the people shall rejoice and say, "The 
Englishman — God bless him!" 

Hence it comes to pass that in whatever 

part of the world the Englishman may find 

himself, he has a feeling that he is thoroughly 

at home. " I am as welcome as flowers in 

199 



200 The Egregious English 

May," he says. "These pore foreigners, 
these pore 'eathen are glad to see me. They 
never have any money, pore devils ! and were 
it not for our whirring spindles at home, I 
verily believe they would have nothing to 
wear." In brief, the Englishman abroad is 
always in a sort of Father Christmassey, 
Santa Claus frame of mind. He eats well, 
he drinks well, and he sleeps well. He calls 
for the best, and he pays for it. It is a won- 
derful thing to do, and it goes straight to the 
hearts of the " pore foreigner " and the " pore 
'eathen." This, at any rate, is the English- 
man's own view. It is a pleasing, consoling, 
and stimulating view, and it would ill be- 
come an unregenerate outsider rudely to dis- 
turb it. Indeed, I question whether the 
Englishman in his blindness and adipose con- 
ceit would allow you to disturb it. 

When persons in France say, "A has 
V Anglais" your fat Englishman smiles, and 
says, " Little boys ! " When people put rude 
pictures of him on German postcards, he 
smiles again, and says that the flowing tide 



The Beloved 201 

of public opinion in Germany is entirely with 
him. When Dutch farmers propose to throw 
him into the sea, he becomes very red in the 
neck, splutters somewhat, and says, "I'm 
sure they will make excellent subjects in 
time." And when the savage Americans de- 
sire to chaw him up and swallow him, he 
says, ' ' You astonish me. I have always been 
under the impression that blood was thicker 
than water." His desire is to live at peace 
with all men; but his notion of peace is to 
have his hand in both your pockets and no 
questions asked. He owns two-thirds of the 
habitable globe (vide the geography books), 
and every pint of sea is his (pace the popular 
song) ; he owns also everything that is worth 
owning. He is the Pierpont Morgan of the 
universe. Who could help loving him? 

On the other hand, the excellent J. B. has 
not escaped calumny. If I were disposed to 
reproduce some of the slanders upon him, it 
goes without saying that they would make 
a rather large chapter. All manner of for- 
eign writers have time and time again had a 



202 The Egregious English 

fling at the Englishman. They love him, but 
their love is not blind. They perceive that 
he has faults of a grievous nature, and they 
write accordingly. Curiously enough, too, 
quite severe criticisms of John Bull have been 
written in his own household. Mr. Wilfrid 
Scawen Blunt, for example, who is an Eng- 
lishman, and apparently innocent of Celtic 
taint, actually goes so far as to call the Eng- 
lishman an Anglo-Norman dog: 

Down to the latest born, the hungriest of the pack, 
The master- wolf of all men, called the Sassenach, 
The Anglo-Norman dog, who goeth by land and sea, 
As his forefathers went in chartered piracy, 
Death, fire in his right hand. 

And the English poet goes on to elaborate 
his indictment against the Englishman, thus : 

He hath outlived the day 
Of the old single graspings, where each went his way 
Alone to plunder all. He hath learned to curb his lusts 
Somewhat, to smooth his brawls, to guide his passion- 
ate gusts, 
His cry of "Mine, mine, mine!" in inarticulate wrath. 
He dareth not make raid on goods his next friend hath 
With open violence, nor loose his hand to steal, 
Save in community and for the common weal 



The Beloved 203 

'Twixt Saxon man and man. He is more congruous 

grown ; 
Holding a subtler plan to make the world his own 
By organized self-seeking in the paths of power 
He is new-drilled to wait. He knoweth his appointed 

hour 
And his appointed prey. Of all he maketh tool, 
Even of his own sad virtues, to cajole and rule. 



We are told, further, that the Beloved has 
tarred Time's features, pock-marked Nat- 
ure's face, and "brought all to the same 
jakes," whatever that may mean. Also: 

There is no sentient thing 
Polluteth and defileth as this Saxon king, 
This intellectual lord and sage of the new quest. 
The only wanton he that fouleth his own nest, 
And still his boast goeth forth. 

This is an English opinion, and, conse- 
quently, worth the money. Mr. Blunt as- 
sures us that in putting it forth he has the 
approval of no less a philosopher than Mr. 
Herbert Spencer, and no less an idealist than 
Mr. George Frederick Watts. " I have not," 
says Mr. Blunt, "shrunk from insisting on 
the truth that the hypocrisy and all-acquir- 
ing greed of modern England is an atrocious 



204 The Egregious English 

spectacle — one which, if there be any justice 
in Heaven, must bring a curse from God, as 
it has surely already made the angels weep. 
The destruction of beauty in the name of 
science, the destruction of happiness in the 
name of progress, the destruction of rever- 
ence in the name of religion, these are the 
Pharisaic crimes of all the white races; but 
there is something in the Anglo-Saxon impiety 
crueller still : that it also destroys, as no other 
race does, for its mere vainglorious pleasure. 
The Anglo-Saxon alone has in our day exter- 
minated, root and branch, whole tribes of 
mankind. He alone has depopulated con- 
tinents, species after species, of their wonder- 
ful animal life, and is still yearly destroying ; 
and this not merely to occupy the land, for it 
lies in large part empty, but for his insati- 
able lust of violent adventure, to make record 
bags and kill." 

When the Beloved comes across reading of 
this sort he no doubt sheds bitter tears, and 
remembers how sharper than a serpent's 
tooth it is to have a thankless child. And 



The Beloved 205 

he goes on his way rejoicing, unimpressed and 
unreformed. 

The fact of the matter is, that from the 
beginning, John Bull, though possessed of a 
great reputation for honesty and munifi- 
cence, has never really been any better than 
he should be. When he interfered between 
tyrant and slave, when he went forth to con- 
quer savage persons and to annex savage 
lands which somehow invariably flowed with 
milk and honey, he made a point of doing 
it with the air of a philanthropist, and for 
centuries the world took him at his own esti- 
mate. Even in the late war the great cry 
was that he did not want gold-mines. As a 
general rule he never wants anything; but 
he always gets it. It is only of late that the 
world has begun to find him out and that he 
himself has begun to have qualms. He feels 
in his bones that something has gone wrong 
with him. It may be a slight matter and 
not beyond repair, but there it is. He can- 
not put his hand on his heart and say ; " I am 
the fine, substantial, sturdy, truth-speaking, 



206 The Egregious English 

incorruptible, magnanimous, genial English- 
man of half a century ago!" The fly has 
crept into the ointment of his virtue, 
and the fragrance of it no longer remains. 
His attitude at the present moment is 
the attitude of the anxious man who per- 
ceives that life is a little too much for him, 
and keeps on saying, "We shall have to 
buck up!" 

He is in two minds about most things over 
which he was once cock-sure. He could not 
quite tell you, for example, whether he con- 
tinues to stand at- the head of the world's 
commerce or not. Once there was no doubt 
about it ; now — well, it is a question of sta- 
tistics, and you can prove anything by statis- 
tics. Out of America men have come to buy 
English things which were deemed unpur- 
chasable. The American has come and seen 
and purchased and done it quite quickly. 
The Englishman is a little puzzled ; his slow 
wits cannot altogether grasp the situation. 
"We must buck up!" he says, "and take 
measures while there is yet time." He does 



The Beloved 207 

not see that the newer order is upon him, and 
that inevitably and for his good he must be 
considerably shaken up. His own day has 
been a lengthy, a roseful, and a gaudy one; 
it has been a day of ease and triumph and 
comfortable going, and the Beloved has be- 
come very wealthy and a trifle stout in conse- 
quence. Whether to-morrow is going to be 
his day, too, and whether it is going to 
be one of those nice loafing, sunshiny kind 
of days that the Beloved likes, are open 
questions. It is to be hoped devoutly 
that fate will be kind to him: he needs the 
sympathy of all who are about him; he 
wants encouragement and support and a 
restful time. 

It is said that his Majesty of Portugal, 
who has just left these shores, on being asked 
what had impressed him most during his 
visit, replied, ''The roast beef." "Nothing 
else, sir?" inquired his interlocutor. "Yes," 
said the monarch ; "the boiled beef." And 
there is a great deal in it. Through much 
devouring of beef the English have undoubt- 



208 The Egregious English 

edly waxed a trifle beefy. It is their beefi- 
ness and suetiness — that fatty degeneration, 
in fact — which impress you. 

Recognising his need of props and stays 
and abdominal belts, as it were, the Beloved 
has latterly taken to remembering the Col- 
onies. He is now of opinion that he and his 
sturdy children over-seas should be "knit 
together in bonds of closer unity," "to pre- 
sent an unbroken front to the world," 
"should share the burdens and glories of 
Empire," and so on and so forth. The Col- 
onies — good bodies ! — saw it all at once. They 
had been accustomed to be snubbed and 
neglected and left out of count, and they had 
forgotten to whom they belonged. In his 
hour of need the Beloved cried, "'Elp! I 
said I didn't want you, but I do — I do!" 
and the Colonies sent to his aid, at a dollar 
a day per head, the prettiest lot of free- 
booters and undesirable characters they 
found themselves able to muster. Later, 
they sent several landau loads of premiers 
and politicians, who were fed and flattered 



The Beloved 209 

to their hearts' content, and went home, no 
doubt, greatly impressed with the English 
roast and boiled beef. These gentlemen 
made speeches in return for their dinners; 
they were allowed to visit the Colonial Office 
and kiss the hand of Mr. Chamberlain ; they 
saw Peter Robinson's and the tuppenny tube : 
and the bonds of Empire have been knit 
closer ever since. 

Not to put too fine a point upon it, the 
Englishman's attempt to buttress himself up 
out of the Colonies has proved a ghastly fail- 
ure. The scheme fell flat. The English may 
want the Colonies, but the Colonies do not 
want the English — at any rate, on bonds of 
unity lines. The banner of Imperialism 
which has waved so gloriously during the 
past lustrum will have to be furled and put 
away. The great Imperial idea declines to 
work; it has been brought on the political 
stage half a century too late. At best it was 
a fetch, and it has failed. The All-Beloved 
will have to find some other way out. 
Whether he is quite equal to the task may 



210 The Egregious English 

be reckoned another question. One sup- 
poses that he will try ; for there is life in the 
old dog yet, at any rate, according to the old 
dog. 

THE END 



The UNSPEAKABLE 
SCOT 

By T. W. H. CROSLAND 

12° {By mail, $1.33) Net, $1.25 



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ready to prove to you, to his own satisfaction at least, 
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born north of the Tweed who was not an arrant knave 
and unctuous hypocrite." — The Bookman. 



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deserts." — Chicago News. 



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By R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVI&RE 



WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 

A Study of Feminism. Translated by George 
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tztim, London. 

" Everything is so brightly, so captivatingly important in 
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THE ART OF LIFE 

Translated by George Herbert Ely. 8°. 

(By mail, $1.85) .... net, $1.75 

There is no one to whom Buffon's phrase, Le style c'est 
Vhomme 7n$me, may be more justly applied than to M. de 
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New York— G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS— London 



The Romance of 
Leonardo da Vinci 



By 



The 
Forerunner 

( The Resurrection 
of the Gods) 



DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI 

Author of "The Death of the Gods," ' 'Tolstoi as Man and Artist," etc. 



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44 A finer study of the artistic temperament at its best could 
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and in combination. A very powerful piece of work, stand- 
ing higher above the level of contemporary fiction than it 
would be easy to say." — Spectator. 

44 A remarkable work." — Morning Post. 

44 Takes the reader by assault. One feels the impulsion of 
a vivid personality at the back of it all." — Academy. 

44 It amazes, while it wholly charms, by the power of 
imagery, the glowing fancy, the earnestness and enthusiasm 
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the past into the living light." — London World. 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

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